LoopMe & Microsoft Boost Real-Time Brand Optimization With AI

1. How does this partnership expand your vision for real-time brand optimization and AI-powered media buying?  

First, it’s a huge endorsement and recognition of the critical role branding plays in a business’s success and how we support making this happen.

Initially, linking with Microsoft Curate enabled us to enhance the addressability and, consequently, the value of our first-party data within curated inventory packages. This integration takes things further. Now, advertisers can carry out real-time optimization based on critical branding metrics to drive incrementality around awareness, purchase consideration, and purchase intent.

Second, being part of Microsoft’s global community allows us to open this optimization to more organizations by helping them integrate branding into their thinking to build more profitable, long-term businesses. 

It’s also timely because, in today’s challenging economy, businesses that will reap the rewards are those that continue to invest in branding. Many organizations may choose to take the route perceived as easy and cut brand spend to focus on short-term performance, but for companies putting their advertising on hold, it can then take 3-5 years to recover lost equity. Alternatively, for those brands that maintain or even increase their spend, they might benefit from up to a 17% rise in incremental sales. This was the lesson learned from the last recession.

What this partnership ensures is that savvy marketers can capitalize on short-term sales opportunities while investing in long-term brand building, so their businesses thrive now and in the future.

2. How does this solution improve addressability and data activation compared to traditional DSP offerings?

A key area is the data. Because central to everything we do – from audience building and bid decision-making, to optimization and measurement – are real consumer sentiments gained from our PurchaseLoop surveys. Tapping into this allows advertisers to focus on delivering their branding needs.

For example, when it comes to bid requests, we allow advertisers to prioritize the opportunities that drive their branding goals by giving them a view of those impressions that support awareness, consideration, and purchase intent. And we optimize in real-time to these same brand signals to constantly improve brand performance outcomes.

3. How does your patented AI technology differ from conventional optimization tools used in the programmatic ecosystem?

Traditionally, optimization has focused on performance. It’s been about helping advertisers maximize the success of their campaigns designed to drive short-term sales. That’s all well and good, but performance is only one element of marketing, and one that’s about influencing just the present. 

We, however, are also helping marketers unlock their branding activity opportunities. This is what influences future success and brand health, because short-term sales uplift contributes little to long-term revenue growth.

The accepted guidance for achieving effective marketing is to allocate 60% of ad spend to brand building and 40% to performance. But today’s overemphasis on performance and short-term revenue has led to an imbalance in advertising investment, at the expense of long-term brand building. The danger is that this can damage the future success of a business. 

We address this by using first-party data and AI models to deliver this. Through our consumer surveys, we gather direct insights into buyer sentiments and employ AI to optimize around branding goals in real time. This shifts optimization away from relying on generic data, such as demographics, to something more powerful and relevant.    

LoopMe offers a full-funnel, AI-driven solution that delivers brand lift and business results together – this brandformance approach is an organizational mindset, where we connect the dots from impression to sale across channels, solving for attention, performance, and measurement fragmentation.  

4. What makes this partnership valuable for advertisers focused on full-funnel or brand-building strategies?

It ensures advertisers can achieve their branding objectives in parallel with their performance goals without compromising the former.

TV has traditionally been the go-to media for delivering impact and supporting brand-building strategies. And while it is still more effective than any other on- or offline media, delivering a 2.1 long-term brand effect ROI multiplier, viewership is declining. This decline is forcing the industry to come up with alternative approaches. 

That’s why we’re working to elevate the value of brand advertising, so marketers can take advantage of new approaches to drive their brand-building activities and fit in with modern advertising. We’re taking the learning from performance marketing and applying the rigor surrounding it to brand spend so that it can be as effective, if not more so, than the legacy brand-building channels.

5. With increasing focus on privacy, how does your first-party data model address advertisers’ needs?

Critically, the data we collect has clear consent and complies with all key data privacy legislation. Without this, advertisers won’t have confidence and trust in what we deliver.

The data is central to developing and training our AI agents, which analyze contextual and behavioral signals to deliver targeting and optimization without cookies or identifiers. This data/AI agent combination enables advertisers to reach audiences at scale based on the consumer mindset and in the environments that are well-suited for brand outcomes. AI allows real-time pre-bid brand signals to drive optimization decisions for every impression, so every one matters and spend is not wasted. Advertisers can then develop brand strategies centered on today’s marketing media, such as CTV or mobile, rather than the channels of the past. And with AI unifying creative, media, and measurement, campaigns become smarter, more accountable, and deliver better results. Brands can then ditch slow, fragmented strategies and, instead, be adaptable to rapidly changing consumer behaviors.