“Agile advertising” at Cannes Lions and the four feedback loops
So we got invited to speak about our experiences from the last year at the world’s largest and most prestigious advertising festival, Cannes Lions. Last year we were actually credited with Lion in the “Cyber” category for a campaign powered by our very own Meme Machine, and this year we had plenty of agencies using Burt’s tools winning awards.
However, our appearance had nothing to do with awards. The reason for them inviting a year old startup from Gothenburg, Sweden, was naturally that Burt is one the few companies focusing on data-driven ad tech with decent traction among “creative” agencies. So we were asked to share our experiences from working with agencies to change how they make and measure large scale, digital advertising.
A full description of the speech is available here and you can download a subtitled deck here. You just browse right away:
As you can see, the talk was not about technology at all, but the process and workflow that technology can enable. And it was not about the future, but how drastic improvements in advertising effectiveness can be achieved using technologies that has been around for several years.
The thesis is that the existing workflow is actually quite ok, so long as you start integrating the four feedback loops in your workflow. The need for efficient feedback loops is actually the main reason for us building Rich in the first place. When we started out we had Copybox and Meme Machine, two products centered around the idea of real-time, dynamic advertising content, or “personalized ads”.
At the time, it was fairly obvious that personalized ads presented a huge opportunity in terms of maximizing the impact derived from each exposed ad. However, since most marketers weren’t using metrics to learn about consumer behavior in connection to dynamic ads, nobody was getting any better at leveraging the tools.
Sure, there was alot of lip service paid to metrics. It as “solved”, as far as technology companies were concerned. But if you were on the front-lines at an agency, you knew that metrics wasn’t being distributed, and when they were nobody understood what they meant. And naturally, advertisers still considered the lack of transparency in online advertising a major headache. So much for “problem solved”.
So we realized that in order to secure the long term sustainability of what we’re trying to accomplish, we needed to build the first analytics product that would also make sense to front-line people, rather than analysts. Any person involved in a campaign should be able to grasp what’s going on when they see a report, which seems like a reasonable constraint, right?
In december we started seeding out Rich to of our friends, and beginning early may we’ve onboarded more and more users. We’re now into the hundreds of accounts created, having tracked billions of exposures.
It’s been great to see that an easy-to-use metrics tool can be such a powerful driver in changing behavior. We’re also happy to see that those people predicting that “creative types” Not that anyone should be surprised. Metrics is a great game mechanism, that makes people obsess about everything from Baseball to Farmville.
The next couple of months will be really exciting, as we ourselves get more and more feedback on how our users respond to Rich. We like to look at it as that we’re in the first our four feedback loops, working hard to level up to feedback loop number two
However, our appearance this year had nothing to do with awards. The reason for Cannes Lions inviting a year old startup from Gothenburg, Sweden, was that Burt is one the few companies focusing on data-driven ad tech with decent traction among “creative” agencies. So we were asked to share our experiences from working with some of the world’s top agencies to change how they make and measure large scale, digital advertising.
As you can see in the deck, the talk was not about technology at all, but rather the process and workflow that technology can enable if used properly. And it was not about the future, but rather how drastic improvements in advertising effectiveness can be achieved using technologies that has been around for several years. For startup geeks, think of it as an attempt to apply the “lean startup” philosophy to digital advertising.
In fact, in honor of Eric Ries and Steve Blank I actually thought about naming the speech “lean advertising”, or even “the lean agency”, but felt didn’t convey the sense of speed and dynamic capabilities required when working on campaigns.
The thesis (currently a work in progress) is that the existing workflow is actually quite ok – no need to “reinvent the agency” – so long as you start integrating “the four feedback loops” of Agile advertising. The need for efficient feedback loops was actually the main reason for us building Rich in the first place. When we started out we had Copybox and Meme Machine, two products centered around the idea of real-time, dynamic advertising content, or “personalized ads”.
At the time, it was fairly obvious that personalized ads presented a huge opportunity in terms of maximizing the impact derived from each exposed ad. However, since most marketers weren’t using metrics to learn about consumer behavior in connection to dynamic ads, nobody was getting any better at leveraging the tools.
Sure, there has been alot of lip service paid to metrics in online advertising. Metrics was considered “solved”, as far as technology companies were concerned. But if you worked in the front-lines at an agency, you knew that campaigns metrics wasn’t being distributed, and when they were nobody understood what they meant and how to take action. Not to mention the fact that advertisers still considered the lack of transparency in online advertising a major headache. So much for “problem solved”
So we realized that in order to secure the long term sustainability of what we’re trying to accomplish, we needed to build the first analytics product that would also make sense to front-line people, rather than analysts.
Any person involved in a campaign should be able to grasp what’s going on when they see a report and use analytics to improve. Seems like a reasonable constraint, right?
In december we started seeding out an early beta of Rich to of our friends, and from may we’ve onboarded more and more users. We’re now into the hundreds of accounts created, having tracked billions of exposures. It’s been great to see that an easy-to-use metrics tool can be such a powerful driver in changing behavior.
We’re also happy to see that those predicting that “creative types” wouldn’t be interested in data, technology and metrics were plain wrong. Creatives really love metrics – not to mention the competitive dimension they bring Not that anyone should be surprised. Metrics is a great game mechanism, that makes people obsess about everything from Baseball to Farmville. The next couple of months will be really exciting or us, as we get more and more feedback on Rich. We like to look at it as that Rich is in the second our four feedback loops, working hard to level up to feedback loop number three
Tomorrow I’ll be holding a 2 hour workshop at Cannes Lions, the world’s biggest advertising festival where 25 000 delegates from 90 countries spend a week on the french riviera doing high fives over the year that just went by and worrying about the next.
The topic of my talk is “Agile advertising”. For you startup geeks out there I guess you can say I’m giving advertising the “lean startup” treatment. For those of you with real jobs, I’ll be talking about how we can reduce the risk and increase our output for campaigns where media fragmentization and hyper competition are significant factors.
It’s quite the opposite to your case study driven, inspirational, future oriented Cannes Lions talk, which is naturally both challenging and fun. One of my key points is to “optimize for now”, which is a phrase I’ve stolen from the always so brilliant 37signals.
It just seems to me that great advertising has always been the one that connected with the present, not predicted the future. The first mover advantages are rare in all of business, and even more so in the world of advertising.
From Burt’s perspective it feels great to have our ideas validated by Cannes Lions, the epitome of creative advertising. For the last year we’ve been working super hard to better understand how we can make technology and data driven decision making appeal to a wider audience, and it feels like we have arrived.
Although Burt was actually awarded at last year’s Cannes Lions, people told me I was crazy to leave the green pastures of CP+B to focus on building software. And now they’re using our products.
A lot can happen in a year.
And oh, I had lunch next to Mark Zuckerberg, who’s also speaking. Or not so much speaking as being interviewed on stage. He looked like a combo of Bill Gates and Tom Cruise in “Risky business”.
And finally, the outline of my talk:
Agile advertising It’s harder than ever to anticipate which ideas and executions will work well and great opportunities tend to present themselves once campaigns are already live. The reason for this is simple: consumers are less predictable and the media landscape is more complex than ever before. With so many unknown factors to consider, the current, linear process for concept development and production is an increasingly blunt tool.
In this workshop Gustav von Sydow, Founder of Burt, proposes the idea of “Agile Advertising”, a concept for harnessing continuous learning and modification, optimising the workflow for responding to change, rather than blindly following a plan.
The workshop will explain what to measure and when, and how to make sure that insights from analytics is integrated into the creative process. Delegates can learn to utilise methods such as “rapid prototyping”, “discount pre-testing” and “dynamic optimisation” to make advertising powerful and predictable, innovating more quickly based on measuring actual user response.
The best practices taught and lessons learned are based on von Sydow’s experience developing a leading analytics software for digital advertising. Burt also conducted a series of interviews on advertising efficiency with leading advertisers and top talent in digital departments all over the world. Just like these agencies and advertisers, delegates can learn to welcome change, even late in the process, and harness that change as a competitive advantage.
This is the first in a series of blog posts on online advertising metrics.
Agreement on what different metrics mean is key to put them to productive use. We are currently in the middle of writing up a dictionary for Rich, so that our users can better understand what they are looking at and make easier for them learn how to improve. But getting a proper definition of metrics is not easy, and looking at how other companies use their metrics is not much help.
Take Reach for example, perhaps the most central concept in any media plan. The basic concept for reach is very simple – as the name implies, how many unique individuals did our campaign reach? It does not include any qualitative aspects, such as how many times did we reach each person on average (so called average frequency) or how much impact we got on average for each individual reached. It’s just a raw number – How. Many. Individuals?
Historically, reach has been calculated in different ways depending on media, for instance combining consumer behavior studies and raw distribution in print and a black box combination of set top boxes, phone surveys etc. in TV.
When digital advertising came of age, the industry rejoiced since we could now shoot out a reach metric based on direct observation (usually some cookie counting scheme) rather than some shady statistical model. So in our reports, we get exact numbers. Very impressive. Makes it seem like we really know our stuff, right? However, this is all bullshit. With consumers deleting cookies like crazy and government regulation making it increasingly hard to record user behavior, this model is getting increasingly unsustainable.
I know, I know, there are ways of improving your data integrity thru Flash cookies, device fingerprinting (browser, OS, resolution etc.). At Burt we naturally do things like this, but since people increasingly access online media thru multiple browsers on multiple devices in multiple places, we’re fighting a battle that can’t be won.
Clearly, we have to give up on to the notion that cookies = reach. Stop pretending like we got the exact numbers nailed. Start talking about individuals when describing reach in digital advertising – not cookies, fingerprints etc. Until the singularity hits, advertising is meant to influence human beings, not machines.
At least for now, people buy stuff, computers don’t.
In our industry having a 99.99% uptime is the difference between getting payed by your customer and paying your customer.
As a skilled systems administrator you’ll join one of the most competent web application teams in Europe to provide technical support and administration to our ever-growing number of machines.
You have experience in running high-traffic web sites. You know how to best build up a performant and secure web application stack all the way from routers to servers to load balancers.
You listen well, produce quickly and you’re proactive with problems. You really know how to get things done, but more importantly you know when to say ‘No.’.
Your beard is trustworthy.
Working for a startup is fun and fast paced. If you haven’t experienced it before, it’s like no job you’ve ever had. If you’re full of energy you’ll quickly find that this is a wonderful place to let all that energy out. Our employees create their roles, instead of us creating them for them.
Key responsibilities:
Work closely with engineering groups to design, build, and maintain systems
Build and maintain a scalable storage cluster
Write scripts to monitor and automate processes
Troubleshoot issues with hardware, software, applications and network
Document current and future configuration processes and policies
System failure analysis and recovery
Knowledge and skills required:
Experience in operations department of large-scale Internet service
Experience with Linux/Unix/BSD
Demonstrable knowledge of TCP/IP, HTTP, security, storage, SQL databases, and memcache
Practical knowledge of shell scripting and at least one scripting language (Ruby, Perl, Python)
Ability to prioritize tasks and work independently
Track record of practical problem solving
Valuable Additional Skills:
Experience automating systems maintenance tasks
Experience building fault tolerant, scalable systems
Experience with Ruby and preferably at least one more language
Experience with Ruby on Rails or another web application framework
Familiarity with agile programming methodologies
Experience with Amazon Web Services
Experience with Hadoop and similar technologies
Experience with Ruby, Java
Experience with Ruby on Rails stack performance tuning
If you’re interested, please send a short letter of introduction, updated CV and portfolio samples to jobs@burtcorp.com for more details!
In our industry having 99.99% uptime is the difference between getting payed by the customer and paying the customer. If you’ll ever work for a company that really appreciates your work – it’s us!
As a skilled systems administrator you’ll join one of the most competent web application teams in Europe (here, here, here, here and here) to provide technical support and administration to our ever-growing number of machines.
You have experience in running high-traffic web sites. You know how to build a high performance and secure web application stack all the way from routers to servers to load balancers.
You listen well, produce quickly and you’re proactive with problems. You really know how to get things done, but more importantly you know when to say ‘No.’.
Working for a startup is fun and fast paced. If you haven’t experienced it before, it’s like no job you’ve ever had. If you’re full of energy you’ll quickly find that this is a wonderful place to let all that energy out. Our employees create their roles, instead of us creating them for them.
Key responsibilities:
Work closely with engineering groups to design, build, and maintain systems
Build and maintain a scalable storage cluster
Write scripts to monitor and automate processes
Troubleshoot issues with hardware, software, applications and network
Document current and future configuration processes and policies
System failure analysis and recovery
Knowledge and skills required:
Experience in operations department of large-scale Internet service
Experience with Linux/Unix/BSD
Demonstrable knowledge of TCP/IP, HTTP, security, storage, SQL databases, and memcache
Practical knowledge of shell scripting and at least one scripting language (Ruby, Perl, Python)
Ability to prioritize tasks and work independently
Track record of practical problem solving
Valuable Additional Skills:
Experience automating systems maintenance tasks
Experience building fault tolerant, scalable systems
Experience with Ruby and preferably at least one more language
Experience with Ruby on Rails or another web application framework
Familiarity with agile programming methodologies
Experience with Amazon Web Services
Experience with Hadoop and similar technologies
Experience with Ruby, Java
Experience with Ruby on Rails stack performance tuning
If you’re interested, please send a short letter of introduction and an updated CV to jobs@burtcorp.com!
We’ve found that having an application that feels great to use is what really sells our product. Our big idea is to help creatives create better advertising. With applications that are easy to use, and nice to look at, we’ve come a long way. But we think we can do better.
We’re now looking for an exceptional interaction designer who can own the domain of user interaction across all Burt’s products.
We’re amongst the many web companies that put interaction design at the very heart of our company. Being a data driven company we’ve got a scientific approach to design. We’re looking for someone who shares our approach and can take our design to the next level. You’ll be working with an exceptional team of engineers, who are all fans of great design.
A degree in human computer interaction is a plus. Other possible backgrounds include engineering, math, statistics or arts. You’ve got to know both your design toolkit and IxD-toolkit well. We expect you to have a portfolio you can show us. Preferably you’re located close to Göteborg, Sweden, or are willing to relocate.
You’re comfortable working with teams, and you often take a leading role in the design discussions. You listen well, but you’re also good at knowing when to say ‘No’. You can work independently on many projects at the same time, all without dropping the ball.
People who meet us tend to comment on our energy, and the passion we have for what we’re doing. We hope it’s infectious! At such a fast moving start up you’ll find opportunities rather than boundaries in every single role.
If you’re interested, please send a short letter of introduction and updated CV to jobs@burtcorp.com for more details!
We’ve found that having an application that feels great to use is what really sells our products. Our big idea is to help creatives create better advertising. With applications that are easy to use, and nice to look at, we’ve come a long way with that idea, but we think we can do even better.
We’re looking for an exceptional interaction designer who can own the domain of user interaction design across all Burt’s products. Emphasis on the role is on design.
We’re amongst the many web companies that put interaction design at the very heart of our company. Being a data driven company we’ve got a scientific approach to design. We’re looking for someone who shares our approach and can take our products to the next level. You’ll be working with an exceptional team of engineers, who are all fans of great design.
A degree in human computer interaction is a plus. Other possible backgrounds include engineering, math, statistics and art. You’ve got to know both your design and IxD toolkit well (iterative wireframes, interactive prototypes, etc). We expect you to have a portfolio to show us, and your visual examples should be stunning. Preferably you’re located close to Göteborg, Sweden, or are willing to relocate.
You’re comfortable working with teams, and you often take a leading role in design discussions. You listen well, but you’re also good at knowing when to say ‘No’. You can work independently on many projects at the same time, without dropping the ball.
Working for a startup is fun and fast paced. If you haven’t experienced if before, it’s like no job you’ve ever had. If you’re full of energy you’ll quickly find that this is a wonderful place to let all that energy out. Our employees create the roles they like, instead of us creating them for them.
If you’re interested, please send a short letter of introduction, updated CV and portfolio samples to jobs@burtcorp.com for more details!
This week we’re adding four brilliant computer science grad students that will do their final theses on media fraud detection, and big data. Although we’ve already done our fair share of work in these areas, it’ll be very interesting to see what happens when ambitious genius’-in-the-making will question everything we’ve come up with so far
Though we seemed to have filled up the geek grad student quota this spring, we’re still looking for students interested in lean startups, customer development, agile business strategy etc. If that sounds like you – get in touch!
Btw – have you signed up for a Rich invite yet? We’re releasing another couple of hundred invites in the next couple of weeks, and even more upgrades on top of that.
The last couple of weeks have been a fantastic ride for all of us at Burt. Since <releasing Rich for Free> in mid december, we’ve had over a thousand requests for an account and we’re letting on more and more users every week. If you haven’t signed up for an invite – <do it now>!
We’re working on a major update that will be released in a couple of weeks, but yesterday we deployed a couple of tweaks that should make the whole experience of getting started a lot easier:
Product tour and welcome page
One thing we’ve seen is that the person creating the account knows alot about Rich and how it works, but when invited colleagues still want a quick overview after signing up. We therefore created a 30 second product tour that you can take right after logging in.
<shot of welcome page>
Welcome dashboard
<shot of product tour>
Product tour
Test your ad
To make sure you’ve installed Rich ok, we’ve created a testing environment where you can upload or insert a link your ad, and test if Rich is implemented according to plan.
<shot of test your ad>
Updated help page and FAQ
We’ve also updated the help section and added an FAQ. You can check both out <here>.
Improved fraud detection
We’ve already seen our first attempts at impression fraud, and in accordance to IAB recommendations we’ve added filters to identify those, making sure that metrics are fair and square. If you see any suspicious activity, please e-mail support@burtcorp.com and we’ll take a look at it right away.
All this and tens of other tweaks are already deployed and you should see the results the next time you log in to your account. Thanks everyone for making the first month of Rich for Free a great one.
We’ll be back soon with more!
The last couple of weeks have been a fantastic ride for all of us at Burt. Since releasing Rich for Free in mid december, we’ve had over a thousand requests for an account and we’re letting on more and more users every week. If you haven’t signed up for an invite – do it now!
We’re working on a major update that will be released in a couple of weeks, but yesterday we deployed a couple of tweaks that should make the whole experience of getting started a lot easier:
Product tour and welcome page One thing we’ve seen is that the person creating the account knows alot about Rich and how it works, but when invited colleagues still want a quick overview after signing up. We therefore created a 30 second product tour that you can take right after logging in.
Product tour
Welcome dashboard
Test your ad To make sure you’ve installed Rich ok, we’ve created a testing environment where you can upload or insert a link your ad, and test if Rich is implemented according to plan.
Updated help page and FAQ We’ve also updated the help section and added an FAQ. You can check both out here.
Fraud detection We’ve already seen our first attempts at impression fraud, and in accordance to IAB recommendations we’ve added filters to identify those, making sure that metrics are fair and square. If you see any suspicious activity, please e-mail support@burtcorp.com and we’ll take a look at it right away.
All this and tens of other tweaks are already deployed and you’ll see plenty of more updates in the weeks to come.
Thanks everyone for making the first month of Rich for Free a great one!
It’s the last pun based on the product’s name, promise
So last week we finally started seeding the free version of Rich to a wider audience, and ever since we’ve tried to keep up with the avalanche of traffic, emails, invite requests, tweets and press - Brand Republic, Creativity, AOTW, AdExchanger to name those at the top of my head. And we’re on track to have analyzed over 20 million exposures by this evening. Not a bad start.
A nice thing of doing B2B products is that we see a significant drop in activity during the weekends, so there’s at least a theoretical chance of being back on even par come monday morning.
Right now we’re working like mad to upgrade our server park to handle all the companies that want an account. We’ve underestimated short term demand by at least 10x, and want to be dead certain that nobody suffers from scaling issues.
Being popular definitely has it’s downsides. Maintaining stability while opening up more accounts will limit the amount of new features we’ll be able implement during the upcoming couple of weeks. But Rich is still pretty awesome, so there’s no rush We appreciate your continued feedback on what we should prioritize!
For those of you that has yet to request their invite, do it straight away and be sure to recommend Rich to all your friends, more feedback makes a better product in the end for all of us.
Thanks again everyone for making our launch of Rich for Free a great one!
An hour ago, we put a brand new, super-stable version of our analytics platform Rich in play. Some of you have already gotten invites, others have to wait some more, and the rest should sign up for a Rich invite right now!
The biggest difference from our previous Rich platform is that it’s cheaper for us to run, so we can now seed it to wider range of advertisers and agencies without going bankrupt. The feature set is a bit scaled back, but it’s still the most competent analytics tool for banners out there. The tracking code is super small and it runs on top of any ad server or ad network. Try it and see for yourself!
Another big thing happening today is that we’re moving into a new space. It’s huge. 5000 square feet. Our landlords are ad agency extraordinaire CP+B Europe, who moved on to an even bigger place down the road, and they’ve been gracious enough to have given us a good deal.
See the guy hanging?
That’s Fredrik, our new platform developer who started this monday and who’s one of the reasons we had to make the move. Fredrik is a super smart geek that will focus on crunching numbers for your Rich account.
Yes – We’re hiring! Burt is an aggressively expanding early stage IT startup based in Sweden. We’re trying to disrupt the AdTech industry by creating great tools for the people who have the most impact – those who create the ads. It’s not easy, but it’s fun! Now we need your help. Are you up for it?(extended background)
We’re looking for a talented Java developer with knowledge of building large scale, distributed systems and API development.
Burts platforms are built using Java, with portions written in Ruby and JRuby. We run them on Ubuntu, deployed on Amazon EC2. We use various technologies and knowledge of any of them is a big plus: Ruby, JRuby, SQL, Hadoop (Pig, Hive), Amazon AWS (EC2, S3, SDB), xNIX (Ubuntu, Bash-scripting)
You may have any or all of this general knowledge and traits:
A general interest in programming.
A knowledge of more than one programming language. You’re likely to have taken up a language for no other reason than “it seemed fun”.
Experience from various programming paradigms, such as procedural, object oriented, functional or declarative.
A great understanding of design patterns, why they exist, how they’re used and how they can be adapted in different situations – and discussing this with others.
Having taught a programming or related course.
Not quiet when people around you discuss programming problems, even if they’re strangers.
When working with great people hours don’t matter, since spending time with interesting people is what you like best.
Experience working with TDD, Agile, Scrum, and other development methodologies.
If only some apply to you, don’t let that scare you. We’re basically looking for someone who is awesome, and who enjoys working with other awesome people on challenging problems. We believe in the principle “work hard, play hard”. You should too.
We make software for the advertising industry. We founded Burt to give people a better understanding how the online media works, and enable more clever, entertaining and persuasive campaigns.
Our products are the result from first-hand experiences from creating award-winning campaigns at one of the world's brightest agencies and Burt has been spotlighted at events like Techcrunch50, Web 2.0, Plugg and Cannes Lions.
