Why did we start SoMin.ai?

12 May 2021

At SoMin.AI, our mission is to transform the industry of Performance Media Buying to let Ads Generate Sales, but not just Clicks. We see these transformation happening via AI automation, Large-Scale Long-Tail Targeting, Content Generation, and analytics-driven decision making.

It has always been a dream to create that one tech application that could change the world. Something that can really transform people and not just be “another mathematical model out of the thousands out there.”

I took my PhD on AI at the National University of Singapore, and there I was truly blessed. Along with the guidance in my education, my professors also gave me opportunities to be a part of various business meetings with AI startups. The more I was exposed, the more I realized that there was a huge gap in the industry. Marketers lacked the capability to act upon the “actionable” insights provided to them by their various tools. All those plots, n-grams, dashboards were just a bunch of data points that didn’t really mean anything to their overall marketing effort, and even less to their business goal — sales.

This gap became even more apparent to me, once I started my own media buying consultancy FMEDIA. We have so much technology built around media but to actually fully utilize this technology was beyond the reach of the people who needed to use them. So by the end of my Ph.D., it was very clear what I needed to do.

The relation between link clicks and sales conversion has always been a bane to lead generation strategies. This has led many to view the acquisition of quality leads as a costly and futile endeavour. But it is important to find the correlation between the value of marketing and actual business results so while it may seem difficult, it is labour constantly taken by the industry.

Unfortunately, nowadays still the majority of Ads on Facebook and Google are set and run by humans. These entail Ad Fatigue, and poor Ads performance. The Long-Tailed distribution of psychographics targeting opportunities (read more here), is neglected, clicks do not bring conversions, brands change agencies, agencies lose jobs, consumers experience worse experience on their favourite platforms due to an overwhelming amount of irrelevant Ads.

 

AI Marketing Platform That Drives Performance

So we built SoMin.ai to be a new age AI performance marketing solution delivering actual sales results automatically, at a large-scale, and with minimum human intervention.

 

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The platform constantly integrated the following four-step process:

 

1. Landscape Mapping

The platform looks at brands, its competitors and audiences and starts building a structural map that it uses as a framework for its intelligence.

 

2. Content Analysis

Then it goes through the content generated within that map using computer vision and NLP to evaluate different metrics that matter to the brands and its audiences.

 

3. Psychographic Clustering

The metrics gathered are then run through different behavioural statistic models to create psychographic audience clusters.

 

4. Automated Ad Execution

Then the platform rapid tests the clusters by automating thousands of campaign cells using different targeting strategies. By balancing objectives such as spend, quality reach and total conversion it then tries to find the optimum performance of a campaign.

 

An Unexpected Validation

When our company was in a very early stage, I travelled from place to place to present this technology and concept at conferences… where I met a journalist who will influence the business direction dramatically.


The year was 2016. The hype of the US Presidential Election battle between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton caught the world’s attention by storm. After hearing one of my lectures about a predictive algorithm that uses AI to profile a person, the journalist asked me a question:


“Can your AI predict what kind of person Donald Trump is?”


Guess what? In a matter of minutes, SoMin’s AI algorithm predicted that the former President of the United States is…


“A Bachelor in his 40s with an Excessive Use of Social Media”!


Well, as inconsistent as it might be, many people would agree that Trump and his assistants used Twitter and Facebook like a bachelor. He may act or think like a non-married man in his 40s (or he would want people’s perception of him to be like that). And that become our validation!

The AI algorithm at its infancy stage can be so powerful in predicting a person’s behavior on social media. So why not use this to help advertisers and marketers target people better with AI? 

 

Making a big difference in performance marketing

At SoMin.AI, our mission is to transform the industry of Performance Media Buying to let Ads Generate Sales, but not just Clicks. We see these transformation happening via AI automation, Large-Scale Long-Tail Targeting, Content Generation, and analytics-driven decision making. We’ve already built a software to accomplish these and we have done hundreds of case studies across 19 markets and all World’s major agency groups testifying the power of AI when it comes to transforming the Programmatic Media Buying universe!

Want to be a part of this transformation? Reach us for a FREE Platform Demo

 

Original Article was published on Medium by Aleks Farseev: https://medium.com/@aleksfarseev/iwhy-did-we-start-somin-ai-46e7cf739fd8

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Prof. Aleks Farseev PhD

Aleks Farseev is a machine learning wizard who can teach a computer to sing "Bohemian Rhapsody" in binary code. He loves conjuring up new creations and is on a quest to figure out how machine learning can make the world a better place. When not tinkering with technology, Aleks can be found serenading his friends with his accordion skills, which he claims are only slightly less impressive than his machine learning prowess.

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