Rob Hall, co-founder of Playground xyz, has launched Parallel, an adtech platform “to pioneer Customer Suitability in digital advertising”.
Launched in Sydney and London, Parallel allows brands to quantify and optimise resonance – the fit between a customer, an ad and the content they’re viewing – across live advertising campaigns.
While brand safety and brand suitability help advertisers avoid harmful environments and align campaigns with brand values, Customer Suitability asks a question the industry has never systematically answered: not just whether a video placement is right for a brand, but whether it is right for the customer viewing it. The development marks an essential new addition to the industry’s core targeting toolkit, for brands who want their ads to truly resonate.
“Today, impressions are checked for brand safety and brand suitability – but never for whether they’re right for the customer,” Rob Hall, CEO of Parallel, said. “That’s Customer Suitability: the missing piece, and the one Parallel set out to solve.
He said “using the customer’s voice as a signal adds huge value to the millions of activation decisions brands make every day”.
“Delivered via human-calibrated digital twins, we simulate and score the resonance between a customer, an ad and the content it runs against then push that into real-time activation,” Hall added.
Parallel combines proprietary AI, large-scale data sets and digital twins – synthetic replicas of consumers, used elsewhere to test and predict outcomes across industries including healthcare, aviation and manufacturing – to bring the customer’s perspective directly into the bidstream. The tech is focused on video environments and platforms.
Parallel’s digital twins achieve 80.4 per cent accuracy when compared with real human responses.
They can be used to answer millions of questions in seconds, allowing brands to simulate customer reactions to creative and content combinations at scale. Hall describes the technology as “a virtual focus group that happens before every impression you buy”.
Industry research shows that optimising for creative and content fit can deliver 4× higher unaided recall, 2× greater favourability and 1.5× higher receptivity. [Source: IAS]
“Backtests against our simulations show positive gains to media metrics, brand lift and conversion rates,” said Hall. “We’re on the first step of a big journey but, as we hoped, our notion of Customer Suitability, in addition to driving more positive advertising generally, can also be linked to positive outcomes. Happily, it seems that what works for your customers works for your brand too.”
The transformative value of customer preference data in the media buying and planning process has been much discussed by brands and their agencies in recent years.
Discussing implications for brands, the industry and the end customer, Jack Cantwell, global client lead, Dentsu, said: “One powerful lever for creating meaningful competitive advantage is by gaining a high-resolution and dynamic understanding of audiences – and another is agile execution. Parallel is well positioned to help brands maximise the value of their data and capitalise on algorithmic opportunities – creating impact through the full marketing value chain.”
Stefan Kurkic, head of programmatic at Wavemaker Global added: “Customer Suitability introduces a new way of thinking about media investment by asking a simple question: is this likely to be a positive experience for the customer?”
Hall co-founded Playground xyz in Sydney in 2015. The company rapidly expanded globally, establishing offices in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Auckland, Singapore, London, New York and Los Angeles. Like Playground xyz, Parallel is backed by Sydney-based venture capital firm Shearwater Capital, which has invested AU$4M in the new venture as part of a seed round.
Zac Zavos, managing partner at Shearwater Capital, said: “Rob stands out globally as one of the true leaders in adtech. Playground xyz shaped how a whole industry thinks about Attention in digital media. Along the way, he and the team built a great business that we were fortunate to back. With Parallel, they have again made a breakthrough for brand advertisers. Consumer Suitability is the ideal metric to optimize toward right now and we were excited by the depth of technology and data science the Parallel team has brought to life. We are thrilled to back again as the company launches in two markets concurrently.”
Parallel launches with a six-strong team based in London and Sydney. The Sydney-based team consists of Jono Mullins (CTO), Scot Liddell (COO) and Karan Kent (Commercial Director, AU).
