A former ad agency CEO has built what he calls the Siri for marketers, and brands including TD Bank and Kenneth Cole are already using it
- Marketing veteran Matt Britton's latest venture is a tech platform called Suzy -which he says marketers can use to compile digital advertising and consumer data in real-time.
- Brands can tap Suzy's self-service platform for a range of tasks, such as market research to test different versions of ads.
- The product is already been tested by many big-name brands including Netflix, Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble, TD Bank and Kenneth Cole.
Brands just all got access to their very own always-on digital assistant.
Matt Britton, the former CEO of the Publicis-owned ad agency MRY, is unveiling a new tech platform called Suzy - which he says marketers will be able use to collect a wide array of digital ad intelligence in real-time.
Brands can tap Suzy's self-service platform for a range of tasks, including market research to test the effectiveness of different ads - all within the span of a few hours. Suzy will pull these insights from a network of consumers that are a part of Crowdtap, a marketing tech influencer company that Britton founded and currently heads.
Crowdtap was originally focused on helping brands use tech and data to find the right digital creators to partner with. But Britton said that influencer marketing had become saturated and over-commercialized. "So I knew that we had to evolve the model and pivot," he told Business Insider.
But he wanted Crowdtap to keep leveraging its biggest strength: its panel of million-plus engaged users. So he added new functionality which lets marketers use this group to do everything from conducting rapid-fire surveys to testing different ads and targeting tactics, among other things.
The result is Suzy, which he hopes will answer marketers' questions as easily as digital assistants like Amazon's Alexa provide people with the weather.
"I have seen so many marketers in my career make so many decisions backed by no data, Suzy is essentially that business decision-making companion," he said. "It's a knowledge marketplace - like eBay connects a buyer and a seller, we're connecting an asker and a teller."
The name is no accident either - Britton makes no qualms about wanting Suzy to be a verb.
"We ultimately want to be a cousin of Siri or Alexa," he said. "If you ask Siri a question, it goes through an algorithm to find answers, but this just goes to consumers. So it's essentially human intelligence from real consumers versus algorithmic intelligence on the other end."
While Suzy officially launches today, it has been tested by a roster of big-name brands including Netflix, Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble, TD Bank and Kenneth Cole among others over the past year.
TD Bank has been using the platform for internal brainstorming and to test a number of different campaign ideas for ads since last fall.
"Suzy has accelerated the feedback loop tremendously, and the combination of its speed and targeting is unparalleled," said Patrick McLean, evp and chief marketing officer at TD Bank. "It gives us feedback as valuable as what we would have typically gotten after months of expensive quantitative and qualitative concept-testing."
Kenneth Cole has also been employing Suzy to help steer product innovation over the past month. The platform has helped the fashion brand figure out what materials it should use to create its Spring 2019 shoe collection, according to Sarah Kirchner, senior director of social media at the brand.
"Suzy puts us in the driver's seat, letting us interact with consumers almost directly and putting those insights at our fingertips," she said. "It takes out the guesswork, giving us a concrete idea of what our consumer wants."
Crowdtap has also secured funding from Foundry Group and Tribeca Venture Partners, and recently closed a strategic partnership with iHeartMedia as part of a larger consumer marketing push.
Britton believes that outside developers could ultimately have several other applications built on top of Suzy. A brand like Kayak, for example, can license the software and build an application that would let people ask questions to help them make travel decisions. Or marketing technology companies such Sprinklr, Adobe, IBM and Salesforce could integrate Suzy into their own platforms.
"I have no interest in building just another marketing technology tool," he said. "I want to build a billion dollar company."