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Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Adgorithms CEO Or Shani (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: In One Million by One Million, we are huge fans of the bootstrapping entrepreneurs. In fact, we have this mantra of Bootstrap first, Raise money later. We are very much in your camp in terms of the way we think about businesses. It’s not like we have anything against raising money but there’s too much gratuitous raising of money that goes on in the startup ecosystem in the world. There is a big misconception that entrepreneurship equals financing that is being propagated by the media.

Or Shani: Totally. This is why we’ve created a very interesting DNA within our company. We do it with the client and internally. We have no bullshit approach. We are not doing things just because other people are doing it. We are not hiring. We are not taking the most fancy offices. We are not hiring more programmers if they’re not as good as we need them to be. Being cautious is a classic business tool. >>>

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Adgorithms CEO Or Shani (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: How do you charge?

Or Shani: We charge is take a percentage of the media spend.

Sramana Mitra: You operate like an advertising agency essentially.

Or Shani: Yes, a little bit. I think it might come up to the same numbers in terms of cost or percentage. At the end of the day, the value and level of transparency we bring to the client is so much more tangible.

Sramana Mitra: Yes. Given the state of online marketing, you can only, at best, do a mediocre job manually. The better the algorithms, the more automation, the better the results. It seems like yours is completely in that end of the spectrum. I don’t doubt your ROI explanation and that everything is very transparent, algorithmic, and mathematical. >>>

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Adgorithms CEO Or Shani (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: In the example with the email system, you’re saying that you prefer to do all the delivery from your email marketing systems. You have a lot more control over the trial and error process. How do you control the Facebook system? You’re not going to be delivering those ads. Those ads are going to be delivered by Facebook, and you’re going to have to interface with the Facebook system. How do you manage the trial and error process given that constraint?

Or Shani: I think it’s the same thing. I look at it differently. Is there an option not to work through Facebook? Not in the best possible way you want to do it. It’s a necessary evil. The question is not whether you have, more or less, control. How do you build a mechanism and a machine that reacts and does the best possible work? >>>

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Adgorithms CEO Or Shani (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Do you do this through your own email marketing system or do you interface with other email marketing systems and optimize as an add-on?

Or Shani: We can do both. We usually prefer people sending things through us. It depends on the integration, process, and the state of the client, but we really prefer to be on the driver side. Another example is email. Once you send an email, what’s going to be your open rate? It might be 2%. It might be 5%. If you’re really hyper-targeted, you can get maybe 7%.

We have Harley-Davidson here in New York as a client. They can send a newsletter or an email with a headline of, “If you’re going to click on the link here, you’re going to get a free Harley-Davidson.” Theoretically, they can give a Harley-Davidson bike which costs $30,000 to anybody who is going to open the >>>

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Adgorithms CEO Or Shani (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Help us understand the how. I’m going to give you some scenarios and you tell me how your technology will take that scenario and optimize it. The first one is email marketing. Email marketing is one of the things that you optimize.

We run email marketing campaigns on a regular basis. The platform we use is Zoho. We use Zoho’s campaigns functionality. What would you do to our email marketing campaign that would vastly improve on its effectiveness?

Or Shani: Let’s start by asking a question. What day and what time are you sending out emails?

Sramana Mitra: It varies. We have a global audience. We send out emails at different times of the day and we also have a lot of auto-responders. When leads come into our system, they start receiving auto-responders. That tends to be when people sign-in. >>>

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Adgorithms CEO Or Shani (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Tell me a bit about what kind of customers you are working with. Take us through a few use cases of how your technology is being leveraged by our clients.

Or Shani: We have clients in every size, shape, form, and language. Some are big Fortune 500-type companies and some others are small. We solve the complexities of digital marketing. Today, if you want to do marketing, you need to master email. You need to master search, social, video, etc. It all becomes very complex.

Facebook, for instance, might change a bunch of things at any given moment and it becomes extremely difficult for marketers to stay on top of this and everything else. Through Albert, they can easily run campaigns without needing any marketing knowledge whatsoever. All >>>

Artificial Intelligence: Just Because We Can, Does It Mean That We Should?

As a technologist, Artificial Intelligence fascinates me. It always has, since the beginning of my forays into Computer Science. I did two startups in the nineties, at the heart of which were AI-driven innovations.

The world’s recent embrace of AI, thus, also fascinates me.

Driverless cars are all the rage these days. Uber is chomping at the bit to replace the headache of having to pay anything at all to their drivers, having driven the labor cost down already to the minimum. Drivers still cost them 75% of the fare.

Yes. An entire profession of drivers of trucks, taxis, buses and such are about to get wiped out.
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Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Adgorithms CEO Or Shani (Part 1)

I believe, over time, the entire profession of media buying will be obliterated. Algorithms will do all the work. This is one of the sectors most vulnerable to be entirely automated by AI. Or Shani speaks on the theme and provides a great example of what is already happening.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as your company. Tell us a bit about both.

Or Shani: I started off in marketing almost 10 years ago in the lowest position possible. Then I worked my way up and became a data scientist at a number of companies mostly working with big brands across various countries and continents. Everything was already digital at that time. By the time I decided to leave marketing, I was in a VP Marketing position. I was in charge of huge advertising budgets and leading large teams across countries. >>>