Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Socialbakers CEO, Yuval Ben-Itzhak (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: So, your previous company was Outbrain. You were the CTO there?

Yuval Ben-Itzhak: Yes, that’s correct.

Sramana Mitra: Help us bridge from what you did at Outbrain to what you’re doing here. What’s similar? What’s different? How do you leverage that background? Obviously, that was also content marketing. I’ve covered Outbrain for a long time. I know what Outbrain did. Help us understand how that experience informed this new company?

Yuval Ben-Itzhak: Outbrain is a great company focusing on ad tech. It helps marketers to reach their audiences across the web with the content. We used a lot of AI and machine learning there to recommend a reader the best content based on the graph of topics that the reader was interested in. This experience helped me a lot to understand how the ad net was actually serving the content and to learn about the different interest graph of users.

Because when we speak with marketers that are usually not the key people, they don’t understand all these algorithms. They want to focus on the business problems they have. They want and expect the platform to answer those questions and to help them at the very beginning of the planning. The very beginning at that time was a need to create the content. To get a little recommendation, should I produce a video? Should I do an image? Should I write a text? Or should I just give names? Should I use Facebook?

Marketers are not necessarily tech people. They expect the platform to help them understand what type of content to create. How much they should invest in content production. Should that be a video or just a nice image? Or should that just be a simple text? Ad network isn’t focusing on these platform challenges.

Basically, an ad network is receiving the content you produce and trying to do its best with all the A/B testing and algorithms to reach the audience that will engage with that particular content the most. However, the content is irrelevant in the first place. The Ad network can’t help too much. This is why the platform that we provide is focusing more during the design and planning stage and providing the recommendations to the marketers. When they’re spending money on an ad network, that content performs much better and the cost is much lower. That’s exactly what we’re focusing on.

Sramana Mitra: If you look at what you’re doing and the field you’ve been playing in – the general area of content marketing – what are some of the open areas or open problems that somebody could start a company in today?

Yuval Ben-Itzhak: Digital is amazing. It opens a lot of opportunities and a lot of channels. Imagine how many digital channels we consume. Every channel has its content format and its unique attributes. What makes it unique versus others? For marketers, this is almost like a nightmare.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Socialbakers CEO, Yuval Ben-Itzhak
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