Last year, Vantage found its product-market fit by taking the rich analytics it gathered from its customers â small and medium-sized ecommerce businesses using platforms like Magento, Shopify, and Facebook â and turning that into actionable insights.
âYouâre giving people insight about whatâs going on in their store, but if they donât know how to change it, or the time to change it, it wonât get changed,â founder and CEO Aran Hamilton said at the time, as the company found that it could, on average, drive a 10x return on ad spend for its customers.
Vantage has now found another customer base hungry for growth that has pushed it into the enterprise: consumer packaged goods brands, which need help in two areas: optimizing brand advertising with traditional big retailers, and entering direct-to-consumer platforms like Shopify to make better connections with their customers.
“The reason we’ve been lucky enough to keep going is because we recognized early on that it wasnât just about insight or analytics.”
– Aran Hamilton
âThis direct-to-consumer work that weâre doing with these large CPGs is only half of the equation that weâre bringing to them. The other half is helping them to improve the collaboration they have with traditional retailers,â said Hamilton. âWhen you get a flyer in the mail, thatâs not paid for by Walmart â thatâs paid for by the brands within it. That concept is co-op advertising. We invented digital co-op advertising by working closely with large retailers to help them leverage their data and build audiences that the large CPGs could target.â
Thatâs why the company is launching several new features and initiatives to hit this retailer-CPG brand market. Vantageâs platform integrates into ecommerce sites, allowing retailers to track issues like cart abandonment and carts on site. At the same time, it integrates retailer and vendor data to prioritize marketing opportunities without revealing the data to each party. Based on the data, Vantage can launch retargeting campaigns and create reports to increase the speed of decision-making.
For companies looking for more hands-on help, Vantage has also launched its Inspired D2C accelerator in partnership with Shopify Plus and Facebook. The accelerator is targeted to CPGs that want to launch an ecommerce store to better reach customers, and Vantage works with the brands on a joint strategy including ensuring executive alignment, store planning and build-out, launch marketing, and detailed reporting. Facebook, Shopify, and Vantage provide key credits to help accepted companies get started.
However, the company is not doing the store building itself; it partners with creative agencies to focus on what itâs good at: providing specific insights that grow parts of the business falling behind.
“It’s exciting to be on the cusp of a fantastic new model of running digital ads.”
Hamilton hopes it will encourage brands to start their own skunkworks projects. âWe think the crux or the focus of the accelerators is to help inspire them with the art of the possible, and guide them through steps they would need to successfully launch and operate a D2C offering,â said Hamilton. âAnd really direct them through the process, knowing it may not go exactly where they wanted to go, but supporting them through the process and ensuring theyâre successful in the end.â
Vantage currently operates in 127 countries around the world with $30 billion transactions analyzed. Asked how theyâve managed to break through a crowded market, Hamilton indicates that they thought early on about thinking beyond just making graphs â the difference is being able to pinpoint actionable items like boosting ads that get more return than others, and understand their customer’s profiles.
âCalling out insights is useful, but itâs only powerful if you can turn it into action,â Hamilton said. âItâs getting crowded, and a number of players couldnât make a go of it. And the reason we’ve been lucky enough to keep going is because we recognized early on that it wasnât just about insight or analytics, it was about the ability to take action. It’s exciting to be on the cusp of a fantastic new model of running digital ads.â