Adalytics: Growing with Thought Leadership

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Krzysztof Franaszek is CEO and founder of Adalytics, an ad quality and transparency platform whose insights were recently featured by the New York Times and Wall Street Journal as well as virtually every adtech publication and pundit. In short:

1. Strong thought leadership typically emanates from a company’s product or service. Especially if you’re a data company, use the surprising patterns you’re seeing among your own clients to educate the market about little-discussed vulnerabilities, opportunities, and trends.

2. Build a brain trust of customers and industry experts to vet your research and thought leadership projects. These trusted parties can help you gauge whether it’s worth spending time and money investigating and producing content about a subject.

3. You don’t need Cambridge PhDs to do highly compelling data-driven thought leadership. You do need data that others either don’t have access to or aren’t sharing, the ability to analyze that data, and the ability to communicate it to a broad audience.

Here’s a condensed version of our conversation:

JZ: I was a journalist in ad/martech before I started Sharp Pen. I sometimes help adtech companies do their own reports. But the variable between the average adtech white paper and the multi-hundred-page reports Adalytics produces is the level of rigor that goes into the research and the data that's informing those reports.

What's interesting with Adalytics is that you're doing that level of research and thought leadership, but you also have a company to run. So, how do you balance all that? I ask because I think other companies would love to generate the attention your reports recently have, but the amount of effort to produce the reports may seem prohibitive.

KF: Let’s start with our product, which is basically a very optimized data warehouse for media-related data. When I say media, I mean log files, DSPs and ad servers, CRM data from Salesforce, etcetera, as well as sales data sets for CPG brands. We combine that data and provide actionable insights extremely quickly to senior decision makers. In the past, it might have taken a brand four weeks to ask their agency or vendor, “How many of our ads were served on videos that are meant for kids?” We think that a CMO who is completely non-technical should be able to answer that question in the time it takes him to have a meeting with his board or CEO.

Sometimes we notice patterns that are outside the norm. For example, we might see a brand targeting people who are looking to retire, and yet they're having 10% of their ads delivered on videos that seem to be made for kids. When we see this happen with multiple clients, it is what we call a systemic issue.

It's in those systemic cases that we go deep, write it up, and then put it out as public research for the entire community, including journalists. When we do this, it's great for educating the community, and you might even call it content marketing, but we also do it because it directly informs the underlying product. For example, now if we want to get a placement report from YouTube, we can conduct a standard check for how many impressions are served on kids’ videos and how many ads are served on videos off YouTube on a Google video partner network. So, these reports and the product itself reinforce each other.

JZ: You use the data you’re giving clients to inform your thought leadership, and the thought leadership enriches the data you provide your clients.

KF: That's right. It's an iceberg situation where 90% of things that we initially see, they're not systemic, they only affect one client, or they're something that the client doesn’t really care about. In those cases, we don't go to the extent of writing a report and disseminating it. It's only when there's that 10% of multiple clients affected, and it's something they really care about, that we go to the length of writing these 200-page reports.

JZ: What does the legwork behind those reports entail? And what personnel are involved? Are companies right to think that, though they might love to produce this level of research, it’s beyond reach for them?

KF: I'm an academic biomedical researcher by vocation. I did my PhD in computational biology in England. Academic work forces you to go through a very structured process of thinking about data, interpreting it, and disseminating it to a reader. And so that gave me some training, not necessarily in content marketing, but just in really structured ways of disseminating information about very technical topics.

But it also helps that in a wider team, you have people who work from very different backgrounds, people who have worked professionally in PR, paid media agencies, and on the brand side and agency side. Sometimes the same person has been in both environments.

So, with this broader team, we can address bullet points that are highly technical, but we can also address questions like, “What is the functional impact to the CMO of X big brand? Why should she care about this?”

JZ: You're doing the level of academic rigor that would defend your findings against very rigorous interpreters, but you also have to make it digestible for the 99% of readers who obviously aren't going to dig into that.

KF: Yeah, exactly. We also have a so-called brain trust. We have a network of people that we talk to and work with both brand side and agency side. And when we're working on these reports, we usually send them a rough draft for almost an academic-style peer review. We ask them to poke holes in the research from an academic or rigor point of view. They assess whether the methodology and data are credible. But we also ask whether the research is significant and actionable for someone with their point of view.

JZ: How do you think about the role of thought leadership in your marketing and in the growth of your company? Because it seems to me from the positioning on the site that you view thought leadership as central to your business engine.

KF: We're an entirely bootstrapped company. So, there's a natural forcing function. For good or for worse, we can't do certain types of marketing activities, like we can't sponsor a yacht at Cannes or do other activities that other vendors might find to deliver better ROI.

For us, this content is free in the sense that it doesn't cost us much to do. But I do agree that it's invaluable for us. It helps us improve our product, get feedback, and also put out content that establishes our credibility. So, it's like a flywheel where we're achieving three different objectives.

JZ: It's the ideal version of marketing where, as we said before, the marketing emanates organically from the product. This allows you to get bigger and more clients. This generates more and more interesting data. And so, yes, it is a flywheel of sorts.

In ad tech, a lot of companies are afraid to invest significantly in thought leadership because it's not always obvious where the ROI is. It's not the same as paid media where you put in X and see that you got Y back.

KF: Thought leadership is a sustained effort. We’ve put out certain blogs and reports before that barely made a blip. But, especially for companies that operate in data or data-adjacent verticals, there's just so many interesting stories to tell. And it's just a matter of having an idea about what's a good data-driven story to tell and then having some close people in your network with whom you can validate that. “Hey, this thing, is this unexpected? Is it interesting? Is it actionable?” Any company that has maybe 5, 10 people, as long as they have a few customers or a few close advisors, they can do those temperature checks. And then once they’ve found something that people in their target audience care about, they can reasonably assume they’ll get good engagement.

JZ: What personas do you need to do this level of research? Would you say you would need a data scientist who’s familiar with the industry?

KF: I wouldn’t say you need a data scientist. I can imagine some companies would be well positioned to do really interesting thought leadership just by running surveys. There are certain questions that if you asked a thousand marketers, that could make for a really compelling piece of content that a lot of people would read. Sometimes it’s more a question of you being the only ones who have access to certain data, be it CPG data, video viewership data, sales and distribution on Amazon, or something else. Companies who fit that description have the opportunity to create a unique piece of content that could resonate with their target audience. It’s just a question of whether they can stomach the potential uncertainty and long-term return horizons on those investments.

JZ: It’s about who has access to the information, the ability to analyze it, and then also tolerance for uncertain results.