Hindsight is 20/20.
But using hindsight to inform your future plans means better foresight, too.
That’s the idea behind Blueprint, a campaign-planning tool built on over a decade of past campaign data. Strategus, the CTV-focused managed service provider, announced the launch of Blueprint on Tuesday.
There are too many “disparate systems that sit alone” across the industry, said Todd Porch, CEO of Strategus. Advertisers can buy an individual platform or brand’s proprietary data off the shelf, but it can be challenging to find a way to “daisy chain them all together.”
Learning from the past
The tool is designed to give advertisers clearer insights into a campaign’s likely performance “before we even launch,” according to Melissa Kovach, media director at PR and marketing agency Jackson Spalding, a longtime client of Strategus.
By using Blueprint, the agency no longer has to wait until a campaign is live to “uncover something that’s not working,” she said. The campaign planning tool analyzes historical campaigns in the same vertical to see whether Jackson Spalding’s proposed targeting strategies – including age and behavior – are likely to perform.
Strategus doesn’t develop any of its tech in-house. To develop Blueprint, it contracted enterprise AI company Convey to serve as a “tentacle” that can reach across various platforms, including The Trade Desk and Resonate, and pull the relevant campaign data, said Michael Dorf, director of tech and product at Strategus.
Convey collects cross-platform data at a vertical level, an agency level and an advertiser level to provide each client with a “customized touch,” Dorf said.
Jackson Spalding has had access to the product in beta for about six months and used it for a large-scale campaign for an energy client that wanted to target homeowners.
Most of the energy company’s customers tend to skew older, said Kovach, but after looking at data from Meta and Google, Jackson Spalding saw a number of conversions from a younger audience and wanted to make sure they weren’t being overlooked in the campaign.
It asked Strategus to pull data on younger segments of homeowners who might have engaged with similar campaigns in the past and might correlate with behaviors that “weren’t top of mind,” said Kovach. Blueprint’s data surfaced a better understanding of younger homeowners, she said. These younger homeowners are more willing to try new brands than their older counterparts, they’re less focused on discounts and they access a wider array of digital channels.
The data helped Jackson Spalding target younger audiences with more personalized creative, said Kovach, and guided the campaign’s A/B testing around price points and discounts.
An inside job
But Jackson Spalding doesn’t have access to the insights directly; rather, they come through Strategus as a part of its managed service offering.
Blueprint is an internal tool for a number of reasons, said Rachel Dillon, EVP of sales and marketing at Strategus. For one, Blueprint hosts years of proprietary information that Strategus needs to keep private. But just as important is the human touch: giving Strategus’ internal team the first look ensures that human analysis stays at the forefront of the tool’s usage.
Having a huge wealth of data is great, said Dillon, but interpreting that data and knowing how to extract the meaningful elements is what gives it value. “We want to allow our expert team internally to be able to look at that and then translate that” to develop the most “meaningful” media mix for a given client, she said.
Of course, Strategus always had years of proprietary data from past campaigns, but accessing that information used to be a slower process that required manually pulling the data from an internal dashboard.
Now, said Dillon, that proprietary data is layered on top of Strategus’ AI personas tool and third-party data, making it easier for Strategus to provide its clients with “bespoke” recommendations.
For instance, Strategus recently worked with a franchise brand that didn’t have much experience running TV ads. It wanted to know what sort of budget they should put toward TV, how big its audience might be and what types of audience segments were likely to perform best. The brand also wanted suggestions as to how to incorporate audio and digital out-of-home ads into the campaign.
Strategus was able to look at other franchise campaigns and develop a full media mix, as well as budget suggestions based on competitor spend and data from third-party partners.
It’s not just about developing a tool that can “[spit] out an answer,” Strategus’ Porch emphasized. It’s about how a human can “take those recommendations, put them into play and put them into action.”
