Hi Hersh, could you tell us about your journey in MarTech?
Prior to Hindsight, I was in the finance industry working at banks like Goldman Sachs and Macquarie Group. My finance role was industry agnostic, so I was looking at many new businesses across different industries. And with each new business I would leverage digital news to help with the diligence process. As a power reader of the news, I realized most news stories did not have enough context and only a small portion of the story was used to provide background. So, the original problem I was trying to solve with Hindsight was to provide stronger context in news via automated hyperlinking. Think of the robust hyperlinking strategy of Wikipedia and applying that to news content.
But, the initial thesis proved to be tough to scale and so I pivoted a few times as I better understood the marketing industry landscape. As I more closely looked at revenue models of publishers and what was happening with the winding down of third-party cookies, I realized the need for a better, more user-friendly model for advertising. With this idea, the Hindsight team repurposed our technology stack, which fundamentally understands the core context and topics of an article to serve an experience, to drive our Adaptive Ad framework.
How has the Covid-19 Pandemic reshaped your view of the business environment that your business operates in?
The pandemic had a few impacts on the media industry. The biggest revenue impact was a brand safety one where a lot of advertisers did not want to advertise against coronavirus content and a lot of advertisers in pandemic affected industries like travel shut down their budget, which materially impacted CPMs. Another impact was the importance of fact-checking and fake news algorithms.
However, the biggest impact in the past year is not pandemic-related but relates to the deletion of the third-party cookie. With this new movement, both publishers and advertisers need to change their monetization and targeting strategies to rely heavily on first-party and contextual data to maintain revenue growth. This cookie less future has driven advertisers to look to more innovative technologies like ours.
What sets Hindsight apart from the competition?
Our technology is our key differentiator. We have built our artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP) models in-house to power our adaptive technology, which is extremely verticalized and much more granular than traditional contextual targeting classification models. In fact, we have different models in place for each of the verticals we operate in that are trained by immense data which provides unique barriers to entries versus competitors.
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In the years to come, what direction do you envisage Video Advertising?
I see video advertising being as sophisticated and targeted as programmatic advertising. Already there are companies that are creating demand side platforms (DSPs) for connected video and the depth of targeting will continue to increase. The biggest bottleneck is the effort it takes to create video ads versus display ads. But automated content management systems should be able to provide more scale to video ad creation.
Another innovation I am looking forward to is shoppable video content. There are murmurs for network providers starting to integrate shoppable actions within TV shows so that a consumer can buy the dress or piece of furniture they see in their favorite TV show. Shoppable video content is an integrated form of affiliate marketing for video.
As a Business Leader, what is the one piece of advice you would give to those who aspire to the C-suite?
Trust your partners and colleagues. To be a successful leader, you need to be able to delegate responsibilities to your team and trust them to execute. The more you micromanage, the less productive your team will be and the faster you will burnout. Therefore, it is super important to hire the right people around you, delegate tasks that they specialize in and trust they will get the job done.
How do you see the Creator Economy evolving, especially with reference to tech? Your top pick for a book on marketing that everyone should read?
The creator economy has proved once again that “content is king.” I can see the creator economy leveraging technology to better understand what content will drive more views. But, what TikTok has done really well is generate a strong recommendation system for its users.
I don’t have a marketing book recommendation but for business I love the “Tipping Point” by Malcom Gladwell. It’s interesting to observe what makes something go viral and try to apply that to your business.
Could you name one other marketer (or more) that you would like to see featured here?
Dan Pantelo – CEO of Marpipe
Top 5 apps that you use for business?
Slack, Jira, Asana, AWS, Google Drive
As a Founder, what metrics do you use to define success?
My main metrics for success are the morale of the team and the amount of inbound requests you get from prospects. Without a strong and motivated team, a company will have a short lifespan and will be plagued with turnover. And once you start having customers reach out to you for your solution, you know you’re onto something and have reached product market fit.
Thanks, Hersh!
About Hindsight
Hindsight powers solutions for both advertisers and publishers with its proprietary last-mile contextual dynamic creative optimization (DCO) technology. This technology goes beyond traditional contextual advertising to leverage contextual learnings to make smarter, intuitive ads. Last-mile contextual DCO enables advertisers to not only place ads near relevant content, but allows the ads themselves to adapt to appear native to its surrounding content. Hindsight helps publishers leverage unique article identifiers to create contextual engagement experiences within content to increase revenue and pageviews.
Hersh Patel
Hersh Patel cofounded Hindsight in 2017 to help publications figure out how to effectively place ads as cookie-tracking is phased out by the major internet browsers. Its software is used by sites like FOCO and FanDuel to place ads based on the content of the article, rather than the reader’s data history. With Patel as CEO, Hindsight has raised $1.3 million.