Unlocking Customer Insights with AI | Aman Khanna

David McBee: Hello and welcome to Simpli.fi TV, the web series and podcast for agencies, marketers, media buyers, and business owners. I'm David McBee. Our guest today is Aman Khanna. I worked very hard on that pronunciation so I hope I got it right. Aman is the co-founder of consumr.ai, an AI-first company that helps brands know their customers better. Aman is a digital strategy expert with over 20 years of experience in MarTech and AdTech. He was born into the search marketing world with his first job right out of grad school as an entry level marketer at iProspect, and that led to a career working with advertisers of all shapes and sizes, including Fortune 500 clients. Today, Aman is passionate about using AI to help brands know their customers better. Welcome to Simpli.fi TV. Aman Khanna: Thank you, David. Pleasure to be here. David McBee: You have worked with a lot of advertisers over the years, and so I'm curious to ask you just right out of the gate. What would you say is the most important ingredient that brands are missing when they buy media today? Aman Khanna: Transparency, in a word. I feel as if today we get used to doing things in a certain way without knowing what we're getting. So think of the days when you used to book a hotel room. You used to get a standard hotel room or you used to get a duplex. But nowadays, hotels have effectively been replaced by Airbnb, VRBO. Why? Because people are renting their entire homes. You get a virtual tour to them. You get to see exactly what you will have, including the views from each room. That level of transparency disrupted what was a very healthy hotel business. I'm not saying we're the Airbnb, but what I am saying is that we're bringing more transparency into this ecosystem, which today is opaque at best. People buy media and they don't know where they're buying it. They get these massive people in-between when they buy from a DSP and when they eventually are sold an impression on an SSP. In the layers between, there is a lot of murkiness. We hope that that will obviously change with what we bring to the table. David McBee: I am really excited that you mentioned transparency because here at Simpli.fi, we feel like that is one of our differentiators. Our unstructured data allows advertisers to see what would normally be an opaque audience segment and see the data that's inside, so really excited to hear you say that. How is transparency really a part of your world? Aman Khanna: In everything that we do. In fact, one of the reasons why we started the company was that we realized that today, even the compensation model is a fragmented/broken one where everyone's trying to get you to spend more on media without knowing what exactly you're buying. So we've provided a framework which allows, at a cohort level, for you to understand, "Okay, if someone's interested in filtered coffee, for example, in the United States, how are they different from someone who's interested in filtered coffee in India?" Two different things, right? But at the same time, the people who are interested in this filtered coffee, what else are they interested in? And that's a random example. I don't know why I chose it. But at the same time, if you're someone who is selling tea to a coffee-centric country, which this is, how would you go about doing that? Because people who are interested in coffee are not just interested in coffee. They like to go to the movies. They like to exercise or no., they go on vacations. What do they like to do when they're there? How can you understand that at a cohort level, which is observed and deterministic? No guesswork, no synthetic data, no probabilistic index data. And I'm obviously taking potshots here, but I'm intending to. The idea here is that if you knew what your cohort likes to do, share, post, consume, and is a representation of who your customer base is, either prospective, existing, or churned, wouldn't you like to know more about them besides your transactional relationship? And that's exactly what I mean by transparency. Imagine if we could insert that in every form of media that you purchase that allows you to know exactly what kind of media you're buying. Who are they? What are they interested in, without knowing their names, email addresses? David McBee: That sounds very interesting. So how do you unlock these customer insights that lead to the actionable strategies that advertisers can take? Aman Khanna: Most platforms offer a native taxonomy of their own, so I'll take Meta's taxonomy for example. Meta has roughly 3.2 billion people globally, 32,000 data points. And every single person, whether they have agreed to or not, have these data points that you can extract to your marketing APIs at a cohort level. Now they also have 1.2 million viable interests, which means these are 1.2 million taxonomy interests that exist about a persona. And at a cohort level, this coffee example that I gave can be done for a brand. As long as it's important or popular enough, you will understand what else are they into. So for example, L'Oreal or Nike. Nike is a good example because Nike would've sold X million of Air Jordan shoes last year. Now Nike Air Jordan is also a third-party interest in Meta. You can unpack it and find out the people who are consuming content on Nike Air Jordan, not necessarily their customers, what else are they into? Do they run marathons? Do they like walking on the beach? Do they like to vacation by the mountains? At a cohort level, this is their observed deterministic footprint. Imagine if you could glean that. Wouldn't you have a more three-dimensional relationship? Because now all of a sudden, Nike knows where those shoes have walked. All this while, all they know is the shoes they've sold to, the credit card numbers, the people where they live, the color of the shoes, the size of the shoes, but not where those shoes have walked. That's what we are here to answer. David McBee: All right, so let me ask you this. There's just a ton of ways for a business to reach a prospect, right? We've got search. We've got social. We've got search engine marketing. We've got audio, video, streaming TV, all legacy medias, billboards, TV, radio. So there's a lot of layers between the advertiser and the consumer. How can an advertiser truly know which of those channels are effectively driving business? Aman Khanna: That's a really good question. That's a measurement question, but the way we answer it is slightly interesting. We take all of those voices. We look at a consumer in three different pillars. What are they thinking? And usually what you're thinking is an extension of your search bar. Today, Google allows you to download 20 years of your search history and I welcome viewers to download it. You'd be surprised. For example, "Hey, does DayQuil have alcohol? Because I'm about to give it to my eight-year-old." You'd be searching that because you're thinking it. So that's an extension of your thought process. What are people doing? So imagine you go to a good restaurant and you take a picture of your plate of food and you Instagram it. Is it Instagram-worthy? Or you check in in Meta because you're at a concert, or same thing on Instagram as well, I guess. And then that's a very good proxy of what you're doing. It's not a proxy. It's actually what you are doing. And the third is what are people saying? You mentioned this yourself. Now what people are saying is an amalgamation of what is commentary about on the likes of Reddit to LinkedIn to Quora to blogs, to all of these places where people are coming out and commenting on these Nike Air Jordan shoes, for example. Right? We take the amalgamation of all of these data assets and we program them into what we call the AI twin. So to answer your question, imagine if you could speak to a cohort of people that is a definite representation ... I use the word "definite" because we're bookending its knowledge. It's not like ChatGPT ... and we're saying, "Hey. People with the interest of Nike Air Jordan shoes that have searched, consumed content on it on search engines like Google and Bing have consumed content on it on social media profiles." That includes TikTok, Pinterest, Snapchat, and of course Facebook and Insta. Those that have commented on it and have the history of its comments, both positive and negative, as well as its competition on the likes of Reddit, as well as these blogs, if I were to push that into the memory of a twin of your ideal customer, whether that's an existing customer, current customer, past customer, prospective customer, or competitor's customer, that's up to you. We give the controls to the brand to then ask them the exact same question you just did, which is, "What should be my ideal channel mix? Where would I best reach you? What are you binge-watching on Netflix? How can I best understand the way to have Nike be prioritized over Reebok or Adidas or insert brand here?" David McBee: And once you've kind of created that twin, then how do you activate that in media? Aman Khanna: Excellent question. I'm glad you asked that too because at the end of the day, data without any sort of activatable insight is, in fact, useless. In my opinion, research companies make a lot of money. Focus groups make a ... shouldn't use the word ... boatload of money in providing you these insights that sometimes you can do nothing with, right? We don't believe in that. Every single insight that we will provide has an activation arm and we plug directly into these platforms where you can translate the interests, the passions, the habits, the social media consumption or search-based consumption and translate that into what could be a plan that you purchased directly in these platforms via our platform. So we are the API link that directly lets you activate into these platforms as you decide to learn from the AI twins, as well as the reports that are embedded in their programming that allow you to make this direct action. David McBee: That kind of blows my mind. Is it possible for you to activate that kind of data on Simpli.fi's platform? Aman Khanna: Absolutely. So think of it today, if we can learn from the social media behavior what people are doing. So for example, I tell you that not all the people, but a large portion of people that are consuming content on Nike Air Jordan shoes on Meta, on Facebook and Instagram, they really like yoga and they really like herbal tea, and then they like to vacation in the mountains, right? Now these are all interests that I just named. Imagine being able to take that to programmatic. Today, there is no bridge that exists between what people spend most of their time on today, which believe it or not, I mean most people do, is social media. But then how do you translate that into what people are actually reading, which is what programmatic media can play a very active role in? So imagine taking the learnings of social media and implementing it into the likes of the DSP of a Simpli.fi where you have the available taxonomy that you can just plug and play or map against, right? You often pay these middlemen like the Peer39s, the [inaudible 00:11:17], the Alliance of the world to then have this data CPM layer that offers you this intelligence, but are basically DSP-agnostic. So that's where we think we can play a really big role in bringing more transparency in terms of what people are actually interested in that might not be intuitive that allows you to buy on a DSP like Simpli.fi. I hope that makes sense. David McBee: No, it makes perfect sense. And it's kind of brilliant because often when we talk to brands and agencies, we ask them to describe their best clients so that we can create a lookalike audience or something like that, and they don't know the answers or they have a very generic "men over 50 who like baseball" kind of answer, right? So it sounds like you could enhance that answer so that whatever they activate on the Simpli.fi platform is actually more effective in the long run, which is why you're here today on Simpli.fi TV. That was awesome. Thank you so much. That was so valuable. We are out of time, but I'm going to ask you to please let people know how they can reach you and find out more about consumr.ai. Aman Khanna: Absolutely. The parent company is Profit Wheel. You can reach me directly ar aman, A-M-A-N, @profitwheel.com. And feel free to reach out directly on the website as well. I think what you've just stated is total truth. And more importantly, I really like the fact that we can have a candid conversation like this. Happy to share more. Happy to share how we can help you Across Simpli.fi, as well as your entire media needs. But we can also ingest first-party data, so to what you just said, right? Imagine if you have a Meta Pixel firing on your site or GA events. People who have come to your site or performed an action, we can actually unpack them because what you just said is very true. People have an emotional reaction to who their ideal customer is. It's not data-backed. And that's what we can help answer, and then help you then to translate that into a Simpli.fi buy. David McBee: That's awesome. Well, Aman, thank you so much for being my guest today on Simpli.fi TV. Aman Khanna: It's been a pleasure. Thank you. David McBee: And thank you guys for watching Simpli.fi TV. Be sure to hit the "Follow" or "Subscribe" button on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, wherever you happen to be watching this episode, and make sure that you are getting those golden nuggets of information in our future episodes. And if you found this episode valuable, please rate, review, and share Simpli.fi TV so that we can grow our audience and reach more people. I'm David McBee. Be awesome and we'll see you next time.