Conway’s Law of Engineering Management
October 4, 2024
How Nexxen’s Discovery Platform, DSP and Human Intelligence Helps Lexus Achieve Success YoY
Albert Thompson, Managing Director at Walton Isaacson is a seasoned marketer with 20 years of experience working with auto clients, and 16 of those years have been focused on Lexus. He continuously looks to data that helps him better understand consumer intent before activating his campaigns to drive performance for his client–going beyond CTRs and VTRs as metrics for success.
As a long-standing partner using Nexxen’s Discovery tool and DSP (Albert and Walton Isaacson’s relationship spans many mergers and acquisitions), we sat down with him to learn more about why he chooses Nexxen as a partner.
Consumer intent-level data for precision targeting through DSP
I work in an agency, but I’ll tell people I’m not an agency person or media person either–all I care about is why consumers buy what they buy. So, I think my relationship with Amobee, and now Nexxen, has always been about unpacking the decisions people make and better understanding them. That’s what’s unique about the Nexxen DSP, it’s probably the only engine that is bolted onto a business intelligence framework, so we know real consumer intent and how to target before execution.
For instance, we know that Lexus dealers want a warm lead–someone who knows what they want. So, the only way we started with our Nexxen campaigns was using the narrow domain of interest around the Lexus vehicle to target–this is data we got from the Discovery tool.
Supply path optimization before “SPO” was a pressing issue
Cleaning up the supply chain is a conversation that Walton Isaacson and Nexxen (since the Amobee days) have always had. This goes back years before anyone talked about removing unnecessary intermediaries and wasting impressions on junk sites. So, we never had MFA, or click bait, or quality of audience targeting, or brand safety issues when working together. With this sort of “excellence in the details” mantra, we collectively were always about understanding the real “why” behind performance.
Audience intelligence informed by AI and people
My philosophy is that if you marry human thinking and intelligence with a machine that can do that at scale, then that deep learning then feeds the targeting engine and execution; that’s like marrying a consulting firm with a big buying agency with smart people. That’s why consultancy firms started buying agencies, because they’re tethering strategic consulting to execution, which is the way it should have been from the beginning.
But what’s missing is robust technology that can accelerate all that. To me, that’s really what Nexxen does.
I only worked with partners who let me “program the machine.” I need to be able to provide intel, send white papers, reports, industry research, client data, because the only way that the highest threshold of intelligence in an engine can be achieved is when there’s human input. Nexxen’s DMP functions more like a CDP–it’s evolved over time to house more intent-based data sources and store that data longer. That makes it so much easier for the machine to be fed and learn, and that’s what I’ve been doing with the Discovery platform for years.
A long-term relationship built from dedicated customer service and consultative collaboration
Nexxen has a good team of people and good tech–I know from speaking to your engineers. I always tell people if you get to the 10th person removed from your rep and you still like them [the company], it’s a good organization.
You guys have always done a great job of having account people and engineers all in the room at the same time to have multidimensional dialogue in the same conversation, and most other companies just don’t. That’s a lost art in this business.
Intelligence data that fuels business not solely campaigns
If a partner hands me an audience report, Nexxen Discovery is the kind of report that needs to be the standard–they’re the reports that I can hand to a client for them to make better business decisions with. When I look at everyone else’s, the reporting is not robust and it’s just basic one-size-fits-all.
During COVID we gave Lexus the Discovery reports that looked at hybrid interest and adoption and monitored it go down and then rebound, which was key for local markets at the dealer level [to know]. All that was worth gold to a marketing type because the only category and the only industry where I see that kind of intelligence is pharmaceutical.
Proven results YoY
Early in the relationship with Nexxen, when we were optimizing the DMP with Discovery data around online inquiries, we had so much success with the campaign that I think it was unbelievable to the client. At first, they noted that purchase inquiries were a very narrow KPI–but then the number of test drives were so off the charts that they didn’t believe it until we were doing it year-over-year.
