Branded feature set adds new forecasting and relevancy tools to Kevel’s AI Audience and DecisionAPI products as part of the Retail Media CloudTM
Durham North Carolina, July 10, 2024 - Kevel, the API-first ad serving company, is announcing its new branded AI feature set: Kai (Kevel Artificial Intelligence), a suite of AI and machine learning technologies that enable performance optimization and drives relevancy, profitability and revenue. Kai is available as part of the Retail Media CloudTM, the ultimate SaaS platform for building retail media networks with ad serving that maximizes share of advertiser budgets.
The new tools were developed and spearheaded by Kevel’s AI/ML research group, chaired by CTO Tim Ewald, Sr. Director of Research and W3C member Paul DeGrandis, Principal Data Scientist Richard Carter, PhD and Retail Media CloudTM GM and Velocidi founder Paulo Cunha. The group has decades of combined experience in AI, which has led them to develop this powerhouse suite of AI features to power ad serving and audience segmentation for a premium retail media experience.
With Kai, Kevel introduces two new features, Forecast and Custom Relevancy, alongside its existing AI Audience and DecisionAPI products. Kevel Forecast predicts inventory and campaign performance for existing and future campaigns using machine learning simulations to generate insights on both current and future ad flights.
“Forecast is a first of its kind for retail media. Traditional forecasting tools look simply at historical data to predict future campaign performance, whereas Kevel Forecast uses machine learning algorithms to project future campaign performance when considering all contextual and user audience targeting and pacing parameters in conjunction with other running or future ads. This way, advertisers always know exactly what their future performance looks like and retailers can maximize their inventory yield,” Paulo Cunha, Retail Media Cloud GM at Kevel explains.
Kevel’s Custom Relevancy allows for retailers to input their own AI/ML algorithms into Kevel Ad Server for custom targeting geared towards the individual performance of each network. Functioning as a unique ‘BYOM’ (bring your own model), Custom Relevancy helps retailers utilize their own advanced models to determine relevance as part of their ad stack in a safe and secure way.
“Retailers know their customers better than anyone else, but struggle to influence their ad serving with the exceptional AI-driven optimization they use for promoting a customized user experience,” commented Tim Ewald, CTO at Kevel. “That all changes with Custom Relevancy, which allows customers to plug their own ML models into our ad decision process to dynamically adjust relevancy and improve ad serving a per-user basis."
Kai encompasses not just new features like Forecast and Custom Relevancy, but existing features like ad decisioning and pacing. Kevel’s approach to pacing, delivery and decisioning leans into historical data, events, previous behavior, context of the experience, ads viewed, and relevancy scoring, plus trends and predictions to drive ad performance.
“What excites me about KAI is that it's a set of features that showcases how machine learning can be used to deliver more value to our customers. We’ve developed these systems from original research using proprietary data sets, harnessing our many years of experience in ad serving,” stated Richard Carter, Principal Data Scientist. “We’ve been working closely with retail customers to prove where the most value sits and it’s in decisioning, relevancy and segmentation. KAI is just the start of many more innovative, unique features in our pipeline.”
About Kevel
Kevel powers world-class retail media networks with the Retail Media Cloud™. With the combination of Kevel Ad Server and Kevel Audience, multi-brand retailers, marketplaces, and ecommerce companies can launch limitless ad formats and unique targeting segments online and in-store, all with closed-loop attribution. Kevel believes that every digital retailer should have the capability to scale their own distinct ad platform, just like big tech players like Amazon. Customers like Edmunds, Delivery Hero, Leroy Merlin, Slickdeals, and other leading retailers and marketplaces all launched their own retail media network with Kevel. The company has garnered numerous accolades, most recently earning recognition as one of the leading 100 innovative tech start-ups driving the future of brand-to-consumer in 2023 and awarded the MarTech Breakthrough Award for best overall ad tech company in 2022. Learn more at kevel.com/kai.
For media inquiries, please contact:
Jennifer Choo
Director of Marketing
jchoo@kevel.com
