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“We have lost clarity amongst the complexity. It’s time to bring clarity back.” said Adam Ray, CEO and Founder of ad tech company 59A. In a world of increasing complexity, and an ever expanding data universe, technology brings greater opportunity to do more with the entire end to end process of media campaigns. 59A are ushering in a ‘transformative renaissance’ characterised by three key elements:

1. Complexity: Unlocking new possibilities and competitive advantages.
2. Clarity: Providing a lens to navigate that complexity
3. Creativity: Serving as the guiding navigator. 

Ray and 59A stated that ‘We don’t have to choose between them. We bring all three together” creating a truly unique approach. 

To help illustrate Ray’s point, Laurie Wright, 59A’s CSO, took to the stage and showcased an extended case study of a campaign for a US based credit union (a not-for-profit financial co-operative like a UK building society). 

Thinking: Beyond platform limitations

Typical campaigns are made up of classic platform targeting, CRM, and previous campaign performance data, but Wright argued “is this enough?” for brands when “Technology gives us the means to navigate the data universe at warp speed... to find insightful interactions and powerful data relationships.”

59A’s campaign leveraged 29 data sets, incorporating data which does not exist within platforms such as assets, deposits, and loans by zip code, localised GDP and deprivation rankings, new home builds and even voting patterns, showcasing 59A’s technological capability to think and activate more creatively, going beyond conceived platform limitations.

To bring this to life, 59A showed how they stitched together previously unstructured data of 139 million credit union members across 4,604 distinct credit union brands to create a method to predict the likely wealth of American citizens. This included:

• $1.8 trn in account deposits (approximately $13,000 per US adult)
• The locations and density of 6,604, branches, and
• the average household income of 35,000+ zip codes (out of 42,000)

Further enhancing this, 59A leveraged several years’ worth of localised GDP and deprivation data to predict where American wealth may grow or shrink in the future. 

Wright summarised: “If you’re a planner, you can bring more data into your campaigns than ever before and leverage what’s happening in the real world to create clarity. That’s really important.”

Doing: Roam, observe, pivot, evolve

59A showcased how they can unleash automated data science techniques across campaign data to identify immediate optimisation opportunities that go beyond typical platform metrics. 

As examples, they pointed out that areas with three or more social points of interest typically performed better than those with less, and that lapsed customers were still highly engaged with the brand.

 “We’re able to traverse all this complexity, generating millions of data points every single hour when a campaign runs, and start to be able to provide actionable changes on the fly.” Said Wright. 

Learning: Clarity on what truly drives performance

‘We talk a lot about how not all impressions are equal,” said Wright “Not all data sets, nor all data points, are equal either.”

To demonstrate this, 59A detailed how, through custom algorithms, each data set can be analysed to determine its worth within a campaign, with that data then acted upon within future campaign designs. On top of this, real-world predictions can be integrated within campaign learnings to build future models of opportunity for brands. When returning to their original hypothesis, 59A established that areas where wealth is predicted to decrease in the future are likely to be high performing areas in subsequent campaigns. 

59A’s closing sentiment was this: “We are operating in an increasingly complex world. But the one thing to leave with today is this: More is now possible than ever before. Don’t be restricted by what’s been possible in the past. Complexity brings with it the opportunity for more creativity, and we should be building clarity into everything – that is what technology enables us to do.”