For all the martech and adtech solutions offered within today’s advertising ecosystem, brands and the people who engage with them are still struggling to find harmony. Unfortunately, even the most crucial industry processes and systems that ‘make advertising happen’ often remain fragmented, inconsistent, and opaque. 

In the advertising space, brands have tried investing in both technology and specialized resources that should pull together all the working parts of a complex machine, but oftentimes fall short. While this strategy has shown promise, real challenges do exist. This machine simply holds the parts in place while marketers churn through the plans, bids, budgets, and reports. So the ever-present question in marketers’ minds persists: will customers end up with excessive or confusing messages, poor and disjointed experiences, or in some cases get excluded completely?

It’s hard work connecting martech products to the advertising ecosystem and to each other. Advertisers are required to understand audience, behaviors, performance data, taxonomies, algorithms, and insights. And then they must act on the data to allocate budget, gauge performance, bid on media, and optimize campaigns.  

So how do we fix a fragmented ecosystem? 

It requires innovation. The most successful adtech and martech solutions are built by advertisers, for advertisers, so the entire ecosystem covers the full breadth of the advertising process – from necessary operational systems to cutting-edge AI in audience and optimization products. 

Over the past decades Kinesso has built such an ecosystem and all the while, we’ve been listening. We’ve heard brands clamoring to customize for their own audiences; to be in control. These challenges keep us thinking, innovating, and downright persisting to solve! Here are a few examples of these all-too-familiar advertiser woes: 

• Understanding audience before allocating dollars. We all try our best, but sometimes understanding who your audience is before you build that asset or commit the budget is simply guesswork, especially when we’ve relied on third-party cookies to help us out. ​
• Gathering performance data manually. It’s extremely resource intensive to centralize search and social performance data to create a unified, channel-less view, not to mention expensive to integrate with the big third-party partners. 
• Bidding on search. Advertisers know that spending resources on bid management for search is difficult, and historically the mainstream solution is to use the Google algorithm to facilitate bid management…which minimizes the ability to leverage your own data​. Moving forward there needs to be deeper analysis and insights shared that allows for further control.  

Meet Kanvas

After two years of listening, planning, developing, and incubating, the Kinesso Product team has now released the Kanvas platform which offers a solution founded on the tenets of accessibility, transparency, collaboration, and innovation. Brands, agencies, and other marketers solving adtech’s biggest challenges, can build and augment their own advertising technology stack in a low-code and customizable way. 

It is time to herald a new future of the advertising industry. Using customizable APIs, advertisers have immediate, “at your fingertips,” access to audience insights, taxonomies, overlap analysis, search and social dashboard data, and bidding performance. 

The use cases are endless, and collaborative relationships across verticals have the potential to be industry changing. For example, with access to customizable APIs, PhD students in the education sector who work on the bleeding edge of AI can easily apply their research to complex advertising problems in the real world. Agencies and clients can use push and pull API connections to enjoy an automated bidding solution with all validations in place. And R&D teams will be able to test their work directly with brands, without needing to wait for product development.

The first Kanvas release features nine APIs with over 120 endpoints and covers taxonomy management through math engines that have been built specifically for advertisers. While this release simply scratches the surface of the capabilities that already exist inside the Marketing Intelligence Engine (MIE), even more will be available in the future. For me, maybe the most energizing aspect of Kanvas is the thought that others are undoubtedly going to take what we’ve built and use it in ways that we could never have imagined – truly embodying the idea of innovation.