June 15, 2023 by John Wallace, CEO LiftLab
Unless you are among the dozens of marquee brands working directly with us, you probably haven't heard from us for a while. That changes today.
LiftLab was founded on the premise that marketing measurement was broken. Our customers needed more reliable, predictive insights to grow revenue and profit, and they wanted it delivered as a SaaS product. We met that need and call it the LiftLab Marketing Effectiveness Platform.
Attacking the Measurement Problem From early on, it was clear that a long list of potential measurement approaches (and vendors) lacked the scientific rigor to determine how your media plan hit a forecast confidently. These same solutions did an even poorer job predicting how you should spend the following week - a significant shortcoming. Most media buyers still used last click and vendor metrics to make spend decisions, leading to many problems. The opportunity for the industry to improve the way they spend was vast.
In 2018, we started using experimentation to deliver diminishing returns curves to our clients, pioneering the automated 3-cell test along the way (try scaling any testing approach across a media plan). Customers loved the concept but wanted rapid insights into their entire media plan and help predicting optimum spend levels for future periods. Our vision became clear. We needed to:
Drive growth and profit by helping marketers spend smarter week in and week out
Deliver this as a SaaS product, putting analytics and powerful predictive capabilities directly into the hands of data-savvy marketers
Ultimately, empower marketers and data scientists across brands, agencies, and service providers to use AI to drive better business performance
In the Lab: Introducing the Science of Marketing Effectiveness In early 2021, we took this vision back to the lab. As we began to tackle economic modeling, I was lucky to have Dominique Hanssens at my side. We spoke weekly. By integrating models and experimentation in a single system, we could understand and verify diminishing returns curves for every element of a marketing plan. We leveraged these curves with predictive technology to optimize future spend periods. With a growing list of early adopters, we re-emerged in 2022, ready to scale.
Customers loved our innovation – we call it the “Science of Marketing Effectiveness” – and business took off. We spent the last year focused on just two things: delighting customers and extending our innovation. We needed to prove success with sophisticated customers against a wide range of use cases. The essential element of our success was to work exclusively with customers willing to reject the status quo and embrace a significant innovation. You know who you are, and we are eternally grateful.
Devin Griswold from Thrive Market talks about how they use LiftLab with their CFO and tying P&L to marketing spend. He recently shared that “LiftLab is the trusted conduit for optimizing marketing spend across the organization”.
Our Approach Today, we're happy to say we've paid off a big part of the vision we had when starting LiftLab. Our approach has given our customers the insight to spend confidently in an identity-free world. We have delivered trusted insight by combining economic models and experimentation in a single system. We’ve delivered this solution as a SaaS platform, and our API-first approach lets us serve brands large and small.
One of our customers calls this process of experiments feeding their model “the baking process." They looked at the results of the early experiments and blew this out for the entire year, considering seasonality. They realized $4M in revenue from one experiment throughout the year. They recently told us, "We’ve taken these numbers to finance and are confident that this is our source of truth. We’ve now banked $27M in this early experimentation alone.”
What’s Next? We're now opening the doors to large agencies and measurement specialists to bring our system to new customers. Our future also includes opening up model estimation to sophisticated data science teams. At this point, we suspect you might have more questions on all this, so in the weeks to come, we will be sharing more on:
What is Marketing Effectiveness, and how does it differ from Measurement?
Whom are we working with, and what results are they getting?
What is the science behind LiftLab's approach, and why should you trust it?
We look forward to the dialog.
Oh, and in addition to this, we are actively expanding the team. You can help us by spreading the word.
Stay tuned for what's next!