A Greater Cincinnati company – fresh off its most recent acquisition deal – has expanded its C-suite. The hire is part of the firm’s ongoing evolution as it continues to bet big on artificial intelligence.
Claritas, a Sycamore Township-based marketing firm and a 2017 Nielsen spinoff, recently named Rex Briggs its chief AI officer, a newly created role. Briggs, a former CEO, best-selling author and industry expert, joined shortly after the company announced its acquisition of Bay Area-based ArtsAI, a fast-growing artificial intelligence-powered marketing firm.
ArtsAI ranked No. 29 on this year’s Inc. 5000.
Claritas CEO Mike Nazzaro said his company is now infusing AI across the entire organization, part on its ongoing transformation that puts technology at the center.
Briggs will drive that initiative internally and externally, he said.
“Rex Briggs is a guru. He’s one of, if not the, expert on the intersection of marketing and AI,” Nazzaro told me. “The fact Claritas can bring Rex’s knowledge and vision directly to our clients as they assess how to apply AI to grow their own businesses is beyond exciting. It's a strategic win for all.”
Briggs began his career at consulting firm Yankelovich Partners, where he was among the first to study the role of the internet in marketing. He later joined Wired magazine, where he served as its first director of research.
Briggs was among the first to apply “neural networks” to create personalized experiences on the web and the first to develop brand-lift studies, which survey consumers to gauge the effectiveness and impact of a campaign. Briggs was a founding member of the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), where he established the effectiveness of digital marketing through his series of research studies. He’s the author of “SIRFs-Up – How Algorithms and Software are Changing the Face of Marketing,” “What Sticks: Why Most Advertising Fails and How to Guarantee Yours Succeeds” and “The AI Conundrum,” his latest release.
Briggs founded New York-based Marketing Evolution in 2000 and was the first to develop cross-media multitouch attribution, which connected online advertising to offline sales. He was the first to quantify the effectiveness of mobile advertising and the first to quantify the unique impact of social media posts.
Briggs sold his controlling interest in Marketing Evolution in 2019, a year after the firm raised a $20.6 million Series B funding round.
He’s since dedicated his time to working with the Ad Council and other charitable efforts.
It was during that work that he discovered ArtsAI. Nazzaro said Briggs made the initial introduction that ultimately led to the Claritas acquisition. Then Briggs remained in the company’s orbit for the better part of the year, Nazzaro said, as the deal went through due diligence.
If step one was finalizing the transaction, “step two in my mind,” Nazzaro said, "was getting Briggs on the team.”
“For Claritas to attract Rex – because he hasn’t worked for someone in awhile – it speaks to the potential he sees in what we're doing,” Nazzaro said. “The bar is high for him, and he sees the potential of what Claritas data, combined with ArtsAI technology, can do in terms of new solutions and the impact it can make on the marketplace.”
Claritas, founded in 1971 within Nielsen, the data and analytics giant, has evolved over the past couple years into a “closed-loop” system that helps marketers find customers using data and technology. The company works to identify, or find who the target buyer should be; deliver, or execute media; and optimize campaigns, measuring data in near real-time.
The company, in its earliest days, only really offered an identify product, Nazzaro said. It now covers the entire marketing spectrum.
All of that is powered by its identity graph, or a database that stitches together records from all data sources to create a customer profile, Nazzaro said.
Claritas has assembled one of the industry’s most robust identity graphs encompassing a proprietary data set of 125 million households and reaching more than 600 million devices daily in the U.S., according to the company.
“We have a very deep, rich view of the American consumer, (from) purchase data to what media they consume,” he said. “It’s a radically different business today. It's much more marketing centric versus research.”
The hope is ArtAI's capabilities will help predictably drive more personalized and profitable campaigns.
Collectively, the two companies serve more than 1,300 clients, including brands like Progressive and T-Mobile; agencies like Horizon, MediaCom and Hearts & Science; and publishers like iHeart and SXM.
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The chief AI officer title is not yet widely adopted in the industry, although its tide is rising. That newness gives Claritas a lot of room to define the position, Nazzaro said.
Briggs, who will be remotely based, will work to define the organization’s go-forward AI strategy and empower clients to tap into the power of AI.
Diving deeper, he will examine where AI can enhance current Claritas products – and fuel new solutions, Nazzaro said.
He’ll also be looking at the organization internally to see where AI can be applied to help better and faster serve clients.
“We create analytics, and we create target groups, and a lot of that could be enhanced with AI. Our clients can go a lot deeper and interact in ways they couldn’t before,” Nazzaro said. “There’s business processes that may take 30 days to complete, that when we apply AI, we think we can get done in 5 days. We could use AI to give us a head start in terms of writing code or help us prepare for a sales call with a client.”
The appointment has turned at least a few heads, including those at Kroger Media. In a release, Director Kay Vizon called Briggs “the go-to thought leader” when it comes to data and AI.
“Claritas’ evolution over the last few years is pretty exciting,” she said in the release. “The appointment of Rex reinforces the company’s dedication to integrating AI in multiple ways and will play a vital role in helping its clients succeed in the future.”
