Alex Collmer is Founder and CEO at VidMob, a New York-based company providing end-to-end technology solutions for a brand’s creative needs. In addition to leading VidMob, Alex has a keen interest in charitable activities, and in 2017 formed VidMob Gives.
As Alex writes on his company’s blog, “in the years since, we’ve worked with hundreds of charities all over the world, working with causes aligned with all 17 of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. We also formally joined Pledge 1%, donating 1% of our equity to the foundation and committing to donate 1% of annual revenues in perpetuity.”
Because I too have an interest in philanthropy (and in creative optimization), I was eager to chat with Alex and get his take on what’s happening on the creative optimization front as well as in the larger digital marketing ecosystem, which is currently going through a transformation due to the emergence of useful AI tools. We cover a lot of ground in our talk; topics include:
- Alex’s recent trip to Rwanda to help build homes for homeless women and support girls’ education through the VidMob Gifts Foundation.
- How the company started by partnering with platforms like Snap, Facebook, and Google to improve ad performance and later developed workflow software to make the creative process easier.
- How VidMob uses AI to programmatically understand creative decisions and compare them to behavior data, providing insights to marketers on why certain ads work or don’t work for specific audiences.
- The potential of AI in marketing, especially with respect to its ability to analyze customer data and provide valuable insights for competitive advantage.
- The potential benefits of using existing customers as influencers, given their inherent authenticity and existing brand affinity.
- The mix of upper and lower funnel KPIs used by VidMob customers.
- The potential for AI to improve the creative supply chain by providing valuable insights and eliminating creative waste.
- How the platform’s scoring system can help identify creative messages that don’t work in a particular platform and inform changes in positioning and pricing.
- Why audience expectations and preferences play a significant role in determining which types of creative content perform well on different platforms.
- The importance of creative agility in marketing, particularly for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) and mid-market marketers.
- The challenge of balancing creative agility with control and visibility for larger marketers, who may be hesitant to give up control of their brand and learnings from their marketing efforts.
- How VidMob is building its own LLM to make insights more accessible and is partnering in the measurement world to provide better visibility into the impact of creative decisioning.
