Founded in 2019, the pandemic dominated the early development of AI-powered DSP Preciso and, as lockdowns transformed the marketplace, shifted the company’s focus towards Ecommerce providers. New Digital Age recently spoke with Preciso CEO Piero Pavone to find out more about the challenges faced to date and his plans for expansion in Europe and Asia Pacific…
New Digital Age (NDA): What does Preciso’s technology do?
Piero Pavone (PP): Preciso is essentially a DSP with a unique smart bidder system that delivers precision targeting, prudent budgeting and a pro-merchant approach to programmatic media buying. We have access to the same inventory as other DSPs but our USP is that our tech filters out irrelevant placements and qualifying traffic to deliver more customers and more conversions.
We are 100% client oriented. Our tech won’t bid on impressions that are not useful or favourable to our clients, simply to add scale or use up available budget. We don’t have any commitments to or relationships with publishers to push their supply.
Our Predictive Intelligence Ranking System uses real-time Machine Learning to predict how likely each possible customer will buy for the next 48 hours. Each user is put through a series of five ranks from the get-go to tailor-fit product recommendations to their browsing patterns to help you smartly sift through the audience to find the customer who will definitely click on ‘Buy’! What’s more, this ranking system continuously learns from the patterns it gets for better and more focused predictions as you go.
Our unique Preciso algorithm brings real focus to our clients real-time bidding (RTB) strategies by bidding only on the right ad placements to reach the most valuable customers when they are most receptive to your message.
What are the big priorities for Preciso in 2022?
Our big priority for the year is growth in terms of geography, particularly in Europe and Asia Pacific. We launched less than a year before the pandemic hit so it’s been a challenge to build our client list without a track record to point to. The flip side is that we’ve had time to concentrate on our technology. Our incredible development team, headed up by our fantastic CTO Anoop Ramachandran, has been working closely with our existing clients to enhance the performance of their programmatic display ad campaigns and increase the ROI of their real-time bidding strategies . We can now show clearly how our AI delivers cost and performance improvements and we’re ready to spread our message.
What sort of organisation is Preciso targeting?
We work with clients of all sizes, but our ideal new client is probably a growing enterprise that has already made some investment in programmatic display advertising. Most of our clients invest in search and social in the first instance and spend something like 20% of their budget on display. We also have smaller clients who invest more in programmatic display than search because they can’t compete with the high ‘cost per click’ associated with popular keywords.
In the past, many of our clients were in the travel industry, which was effectively frozen during the pandemic. Travel operators don’t always invest a lot in display advertising as it’s more important for them to show up on comparative sites and web searches. However, the lockdowns also saw many, many more people start shopping online more regularly, so we’ve seen a surge of new clients operating in the ecommerce and retail space. Many of those clients are expanding rapidly and investing more in programmatic display than ever before, so they need our support in making the most of their media budgets and making sure they are reaching the right audiences.
Our technology now integrates with all the major Ecommerce shops (including Shopify, Magento, WordPress, Bigcommerce and Woocommerce) so anyone using those platforms can simply download our app and start leveraging the power of our Machine Learning technology right away. We’re not looking to compete with other channels like search and social. Our goal is to help our clients get the maximum value from whatever investment in programmatic display advertising they want to make and to make that as easy as possible for them. Display and programmatic tend to be things that brands and advertisers continue to outsource, while social media advertising is something that marketers are increasingly bringing in-house, so there is still growth in display as a channel.
What lessons did you take away from the lockdowns of the past couple of years?
One of the funny things is that, before the pandemic, I was regularly arguing with my partners to make working from home more of a possibility for our team. Since the lockdowns, however, I don’t want to work from home. I really want to be in the office and be around people. Of course, the real lesson of the pandemic is that people can work very successfully from home if that’s what they choose to do, so their employer should always allow them that kind of flexibility.
