Media Buying Briefing: Known builds clients an ‘Iron Man suit’ made of data science and creativity to supercharge campaigns

By Michael Bürgi

One wouldn’t ordinarily expect two guys from a massive traditional media conglomerate, in this case Viacom, to become innovators in the agency world, creating a marriage of creativity and data science that’s just enough unlike other agencies to stand out.

But Kern Schireson and Ross Martin, who formed the agency Known just months before the coronavirus crisis began, set out to reinvent the API of the modern agency, and grew in less than 20 months from zero to 30 clients (including Spotify, TikTok and Vivint), and from 190 employees to more than 400 today.

Known came together in some ways out of the frustrations of trying to effect change unsuccessfully while at Viacom between 2014 and 2017. “We were trying to reprogram the way big traditional media companies worked that involved art and science closer together, and finding an alignment where creativity and science were additive and accretive to one another—not in opposition,” said Schireson, CEO of Known, which added Martin’s brand strategy firm Blackbird and creative agency Stun into his own data science firm to create Known. “Agencies were still buying males 18-49.”

Known has built its reputation on configuring hundreds of thousands of permutations for a client’s campaign, predicting new outcomes based on paying close attention to the metrics of what’s just happened. It’s a test and learn model that derives from proprietary software (called Skeptic) that is designed to generate a marketing flywheel. Campaigns are constantly updated and adapted to improve on what’s just been learned, down to granularity such as what level of color saturation to use on Instagram in the morning versus the afternoon or evening.

“When we launch a campaign, we don’t launch with two or 20 or 200 line items of discrete creative, we launch with 20,000. And each one is optimized against a set of microsegments,” said Schireson. “We’re using modern segmentation and scientific methods, in a rapid test-and-learn framework, to develop and refine a proprietary point of view based on actual efficacy and impact.”

Doug Barnett, Vivint’s senior vp of marketing, first learned of Known through TikTok’s CMO Nick Tran (Known created TikTok’s first-ever brand campaign), and he turned to the agency to launch Vivint’s first multi-million dollar brand campaign (the company had only used performance marketing until last summer). Barnett said he has already recommended the agency to four or five other prospective clients. Why?

“This is fundamentally so different than anything we’ve heard,” said Barnett who talked with about 20 agencies via an RFP process, but said he knew within five minutes that Schireson and Martin stood apart from the others. “The first thing that always leaves their mouth when you’re kicking around ideas or working creatively with them, is ‘Let’s go run some research.’ It’s not that the data is going to be the affirmation — it’s going to be the launching point. That was the key difference. And we’ve seen it in the implementation.”

Barnett said Known has recommended something like 1,000 pivots to the brand campaign since it started nine months …read more

Source:: Digiday