Zoomd's CGO Omri Argaman on What AI Brings to MarTech

Zoomd's CGO Omri Argaman on What AI Brings to MarTech

Interview by Anja Paspalj
Published: March 14, 2023
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Who Is Omri Argaman

Omri is a mobile and digital entrepreneur with 20 years of extensive experience in the marketing and advertising market. In 2007, he co-founded Moblin, one of the first mobile marketing agencies in the world. In 2017, Omri sold Moblin agency to WPP and merged the technology with Zoomd. Before Moblin, he worked at Microsoft for seven years in various business development and marketing positions. Omri is now Zoomd’s CGO.

Marketing technology is becoming one of the fastest-growing markets, with the global market estimated to be worth $509 billion in 2022. The high level of competition means that for a company to excel in the MarTech industry, it needs to be prepared to adapt, evolve and guarantee clients the road to success. 

Zoomd has had a transformative journey. Initially founded as an internal site search engine in 2012, it is now an innovative MarTech company that helps both marketers and advertisers thrive in all segments. 

We speak to Zoomd’s CGO Omri Argaman about what it takes to stay ahead of the curve in marketing technology and how to provide for both publishers and advertisers. He also dives into the role AI now plays in this industry.  

Spotlight: The marketing technology industry is constantly evolving. What are the solutions and services MarTech companies provide for publishers and advertisers?  

Omri Argaman: First, we need to split between advertisers and publishers.  

For advertisers solutions are split between: 

  1. Helping them get more new users, what we call “User Acquisition”  
  2. Helping them do more with their existing user base, also known as “Retention” 

For publishers most of the services are split between: 

  1. Monetizing their traffic for generating revenues  
  2. Engagement and tools helping them engage their users, such as search abelites, pushes, in-site tools and many more 

How do these technologies help companies achieve growth and better user experience? 

For advertisers, getting new users with ongoing, always-on user acquisition campaigns is a must. Every company needs new customers, that is the way to grow your user base. For the path of retention, that is the way to get more from each customer in a long-term state of mind.  

For publishers, the secret is to get the highest CPM (cost per 1000 ad impressions) or cost per user you can. Maximizing your monetization with various tools and services is a must. 

Zoomd began its journey as an internal site search engine in 2012. Could you tell us more about its transition to a full MarTech company? What factors led to the decision to expand the company's offerings? 

Zoomd started in the search industry. On top of supplying the basic ability for users to search a publisher's site, we also offered monetization for the search tool (monetizing the search queries of our publishers' users).  

In 2017 we merged Zoomd with Moblin, a user acquisition-focused platform and company. By merging the companies, we could offer a unique solution to both publishers and advertisers. We could offer user acquisition and retention services, not only a search tool. The merged company of Zoomd offers a 360 solution to the digital sphere by generating revenue for publishers’ traffic and generating new customers for our advertisers. 

For advertisers, you offer access to more than 600 media sources and smart intent data. Can you talk about how this data is used and how Zoomd helps them achieve actual growth?   

Our advertiser platform and products are focused on saving time for advertisers. We do this by integrating hundreds of media channels into one platform and so save a lot of campaign management time. Instead of managing a campaign from multiple sources, we bring it all to one screen. By consolidating all media sources’ data, we are also maximizing the data and sharing it for our needs between the sources. Having the ability to zoom out and see all campaign data or to zoom in for creative if needed. It lets us know more and do more. 

Tell us some of the challenges your company has faced working with big brands such as Pinterest, Twitter, TikTok and Samsung. How did you overcome them?  

Pinterest and Twitter are media sources, we use them to run campaigns for our customers. Samsung is a customer that buys traffic, users and overall performance from us.  When working with big brands you need to act as the trusted advisor, not the supplier.  

Big customers have various objectives for different time terms, both short and long-term. You need to know their short and long-term strategy. You need to know what channels are preferred for your customer. You need to know the competition. You need to innovate for customers and need to offer new abilities as they come. 

Zoomd acquired the AI marketing platform “Albert” last year. What role does AI play in taking marketing to the next level of success?   

Yes, we acquired them almost a year ago. Albert is a top-notch AI platform. Albert is actually a new marketing team member. Being based on AI, Albert’s abilities are equal to a full team of campaign managers and even more. Albert leaves no shopper behind as it knows how to target the smallest niche as well as your main target audience. 

Albert manages all of your social and searches paid media. It does this not only by managing the media but mainly by taking into consideration organic activity, such as site traffic. It buys smarter and better than a human, but it will always require a human for monitoring. 

Speaking of AI, can you tell me about your Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology? How is it used on the platform? 

NLP is used for our search engine solution offered to publishers. It is used after a user types a search query in a publisher in which Zoomd acts as the search solution. The offered search results by Zoomd are done using our NLP tech, to offer better and more relevant results for a search query. 

What trends do you see in the AI and MarTech industry? How is Zoomd staying ahead of the curve in technology and innovation?  

With everything that has been going on with ChatGPT, it feels like we are in the year of AI. It should be said that Albert’s solution has been present for almost 10 years, as an early bloomer.  All the creative production is moving to AI, be it ad copy, images for ads or even a thought leadership item. We intend to integrate and use a lot of these production services in order for Albert to be better and smarter. 

Keep up with Zoomd Technologies on LinkedIn and check out more interviews with successful businesses here

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