Episode # 7 – Maor Sadra 

Seventh episode of the Smartketers Podcast: conversations with marketers using artificial (and human) intelligence to make smarter decisions.

During this episode we talked with Maor Sadra, CEO & Co-Founder of INCRMNTAL about:

• Letting go and embracing AI
• Incrementality and using AI for better insights
• AI as a team member that empowers you as a manager
• AI for Marketers Performance and Creativity
• Human intelligence auditing and challenging AI
• Accepting and adopting AI 

Special speakers: Mariano Saenz from Winclap and Maor Sadra from INCRMNTAL

Timeline

• 00:00 – About Maor
• 01:00 – AI as a software that learns
  
• 04:00 – Measuring incrementality with AI 
• 06:00 – AI for performance and creativity 
• 07:00 – Letting go and trusting AI
• 10:00 – Human intelligence auditing and challenging AI
• 11:00 – Building vs Buying
• 12:00 – AI as a team member that empowers you
• 13:00 – Accepting and adopting AI

About Maor and INCRMNTAL

Maor and INCRMNTL help advertisers understand if their marketing activity is actually creating value.
He has been around tech his whole life. Considered an industry veteran but not an old-timer, Maor has been working in digital advertising since its beginning. 
Previously MD & CEO of Applift, and now CEO & Co-Founder of Incrmtl. He has been using tech to empower marketers for the last 15 years. Marking the past, building the present and shaping the future of digital marketing. 
Maor has the rare and cherished ability to explain complex solutions with simple words. A simplicity that brings people and tech closer together. To make smarter decisions and work better.

Transcript

Marian: Yeah, there we go. Cool. So we’re recording now. So let’s start. Ready?

Maor: Ready. Born ready.

Marian: Amazing. Well welcome everyone to a new episode of Smartketers, a conversation with tech experts using artificial and human intelligence to make smarter decisions .

In today’s sessions. We’re going to focus, of course, on artificial intelligence.

10 questions. One minute answer per question.

How are you Maor?

Maor: Good. How are you? Mariano? 

Marian: Amazing. I’m great. Thank you very much. So the first question, always the same one is,
Who is Maor? Tell us

Maor: That’s a really good philosophical question. (laughes) I’m a tech veteran, almost an old timer. Which means I’m .20 years in the industry. But after 2000, not before. You are technically considered an old timer if you are pre 2000 in this industry,

I grew up in this industry since I was a kid. Absolutely love it. I know it’s crazy and I know there’s a lot of people that do not like it. But I like the scale. I like what I do. I’ve always been in international media.

Up to recently, I was CEO of Applift, a mobile performance marketing company and sold it .

Many people know that I’m very opinionated around the topic of measurement and attribution. So big surprise last year, I co-founded a company called INCRMTL which is an incrementality measurement platform.

In principle is of course to help advertisers understand if their marketing activity is actually creating value, taking value from somewhere else, or absolutely has no value whatsoever.

Marian: That’s great. I’m sure that in incremental, you’re working with AI .
Can give us a great definition of what is AI for you? 

Maor: First of all, it’s software. I consider it a software that is able to learn and improve based on the outcome and the reaction of external factors.

That’s like in, in essence how I define it, I would say that it’s really simple to understand when you’re thinking of, let’s say autonomous cars, assuming other people use this analogy. It’s like the software is able to learn from new scenarios and then when it faces the same scenario, again, the software knows what to do. That’s AI in principle

Marian: Great. And from 1 to 10, how much do you think AI will affect the way in which we do things? 

Maor: So currently I would say we’re at one, we’re not at zero, which is good. But I think eventually, you know, it can be, I actually believe a few decades we’ll be 10. 

Marian: Now you say we are in one?

Maor: We’re not in zero.

Marian: Wow. 

Maor: Well, again, scale of one to 10, I would say we’re at two. Okay 

Marian: Okay

Maor: But we are very far away from 10. But 10, I think has social implications, society implications. And I think that’s decades away.  Also what it would mean, what it would imply, what needs to happen. Things move slow. But to be fair, like, you know, a hundred years in the history of mankind it’s not even a dot.

Marian: Amazing. And can you mention any other, similar transformation over history? Similar to the AI transformation that was going to take us decades?

Maor: Yeah, there is  this story, it starts like this. In the beginning, when God created the heavens and earth, the earth was formless, void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while wind from God swept over the face of waters.

Then God said, let there be light. I think AI is transformation, again. I don´t know if we’ll have like religious listeners that will now make this podcast very controversial. I think AI is basically how we let software create eventually and react. I think that’s really like the most significant change.

Marian: Amazing. Great answer. Moving deeper into marketing, do you use AI nowadays in your day-to-day, job, or while building Incremental? Is it, out there AI in general?

Maor: Yeah, of course. A lot of what we do at incremental is using AI. I would say, you know, there’s two ways actually.

There’s a lot more ways. But there are two main ways for marketers to understand measurement when it comes to incrementality. 

One way is to do it proactively. Means, stop your advertising for a month. Wait. Then create a baseline, and then start reactivating your campaign. That’s a proactive method to do incrementality testing.

What we’re doing is reactionary. We’re basically assuming marketers do changes already. And essentially our system gives them recommendations based on the changes they already do. Now, when a marketer sees an insight from our technology, from our platform, their reaction is an external factor. So it means if they basically tell our system, “this insight is BS and I don’t believe in it.” it’s a feedback. Even if it’s not the greatest feedback, it’s feedback. Now we’re basically taking all these external inputs or external factors to our scenarios in order to constantly provide better insights. That’s how we use AI. And of course the more data, the better. 

I think the same went for the self-driving cars. Like the more scenarios it learns, the better it becomes. So, personally, I don’t use like myself and AI in my day-to-day at least I don’t think so. But, from what we’re doing in the company yeah. That’s like ground zero for what? 

Marian: Amazing. Not only for you or at Incremental, but for marketers in general, if you think of using more in the next couple of years, where do you see, opportunities for marketers in general to implement and to use AI more instead of their intuition, for example? 

Maor: Well, intuition is good, but of course that there’s a lot of automation tools out there or where marketers can focus on strategy rather than execution or hands work. I would say for performance optimization in general, I would say, I would still not take out the marketer because the marketer is the one that’s is basically accountable.

Currently, it’s hard to go to your boss and say, ” well, the AI did it.” We’re not there yet. So I would say that to use AI for performance optimization, very smart idea, I would say where it’s not used at the moment yet. And I do see opportunity in creatives. You know, there’s like image recognition is really becoming better, even in video recognition.

So imagine how much data you have out there, if you’re a marketer. Some marketers really release dozens of creatives per week and the religious use correlation to understand, you know, what’s good, what’s bad. Imagine if you could actually harness technology to actually really help you, not just understand which one works better, build ones for you.

I would say some technology grip gaps needs to be closed, but I already see startups and technology companies, at least with the vision towards that direction. 

Marian: That’s right. One of the main blockers, we’re moving to AI, in the decision-making process or actually with the example you just gave us. Regarding, greatest.

 You mentioned something at the beginning, but, which are the things that are making us, be decades, to move forward in the AI implementation?

Maor: I think obviously the biggest blocker to technology has always been us,people, and it’s really hard for us to not trust what we see.

And, you know, when we think of the technology and technology at scale, especially when we’re talking about advertising, it’s scale. It’s millions of impressions, billions of impressions. It’s actually important for us to be able to not trust our eyes when we think we know something. So that’s usually the biggest blocker.

 It’s letting go, letting go and letting AI do what it does best or letting technology do what it does best, scale. That’s usually the biggest blocker, that I really see, and there’s a certain gap there, but I think it’s been closed slowly and slowly. Like, you know, marketers are more product people nowadays, marketers are more analytics people nowadays. And again, an analytics person is not about reading report and knowing what to do from it, or knowing how to do an Excel. It’s to know that you need to have clean data, trust your data and let the data to do the work for you. Even if there are outliers, like outliers don’t really mean that much in the grand scheme of things.

Marian: And then do you think, people are afraid of being replaced by AI and that’s why we are brokers or we’re not there yet?

Maor: I don’t think the fear is to be replaced. I think it’s more, again, the trusting of what you see or what we think you see and, you know, you see correlation and you confuse that with causality.

That’s often. I would say, if you could replace me tomorrow with an AI, I would say bring it, awesome! Because, I think what I was trying to touch earlier, this is why I’m saying  AI currently is today, maybe two or one, out of 10. 10 would mean that we don’t actually need to work, a 10 would mean universal basic income, a 10 would mean that all jobs can be replaced by a machine.

Okay. Maybe the human element remains strategy, but maybe even strategy, maybe even creativity, could be theoretically replaced. So that future, which is generations away. You know, we’re focusing on a personal development and self-fulfillment, but maybe, you know, 10 generations from now, all jobs are replaced. I’m a big scifi fan, as you could maybe imagine.

Marian: Of course. And which are the things you did not support, from AI being applied in marketing and in general? Like the thing that you said I think here, “Humans need to retain their execution over those things or nothing at all. 

Maor: Execution, I think is redundant execution can really be replaced most of the time by machines, but when it comes to decision-making plus a scam or fraud you know, if you completely eliminate the human from asking questions right now, from monitoring, observing, auditing, you’re going to end up being a lot of catastrophes.

And I would say same as you know, there used to be very simple forms of ad fraud out there. It is also getting quite sophisticated, assuming that some marketers simply stop managing campaigns. It does give smart fraudsters opportunities as well. So again, I would say, the human element needs to be there, not just dictating strategy, but also auditing and challenging the machine.

And again, this is where AI is very useful because it can get better. The more inputs you provided with.

Marian: Makes sense and well, you’re a builder. I know you’re building a company, but if you could give a marketer a suggestion, either buying or building, in-house the technology related to AI, what’s your suggestion? 

Maor: So buying and building for sure. I would say whatever you can not build for yourself in license, don’t waste your time on something that is not your core business.

But I would say when it comes to AI in general, people consider it as a techie term and many people just shut down once you tell them a techie term, if they are not engineers themselves. When you think of AI, think of an employee: you’re a manager, you have a team. Now AI is like a member of your team that you can delegate stuff to.

If you have a really, really good team member and you can delegate more stuff to them, you’re actually doing a fantastic job as a manager. The better your employees do, the better your team does, the better you are doing as a manager. Don’t think of AI as something that could replace you think of it as something that empowers you.

And I would say even if you’re not managing a team, the fact that you’re managing and technologies that can actually do stuff for you and you can delegate stuff for them. Maybe put aside the term AI, if it scares you too much. I used to say the same for companies who did stuff on the blockchain. So, you know, certain people heard blockchain, boom, their brain shuts down because they were like too complicated. I don’t get it. Leave it aside. 

You don’t need to think of the underlying technology. You don’t need to understand it and you don’t need to be afraid that it’s so sophisticated. This is not like, regard the Arnold Schwartzenegger movie with Skynet. 

Marian: It’s not terminator no? 

Maor: Terminator! Yeah. 

So again, this is not the concern we’re not there. But I’m saying the point is, think of it as just another employee, a very smart employee.

Cause what is AI? It’s artificial intelligence. Intelligence is the ability to learn. That’s what AI is, is something that is able to learn as it goes from external factors from external scenarios.

So that’s that. 

Marian: That was great. I’ll tell you the definition I always like using is, prediction machines, or I read the, predicting machines book and I think it’s super simple, how we express, how machines are helping us make decisions and do our work. So I think it’s the art of predicting a lot better than humans to afterwards making decisions.

 It was great having you in the show, any final thoughts you’re willing to share with the, with the audience in general, if you could give us, an advice on how to move forward, faster or which things we should be doing to take the most out of AI?

Maor: You know, AI has been starting to become a bit more popular in medicine as well, diagnostics, for example, which is again, if someone is afraid of AI, that would be like, “oh my God, my doctor will be replaced” which is probably one of the last positions or jobs that you’ve ever thought. But again, if you just understand what AI is, it’s about taking an enormous sets of data, processing it and learning literally learning from new scenarios it needs. 

So I would say that at the end, it’s nothing to be afraid of. It’s something to accept, adopt. People do not need to understand the depths of AI in order to just accept it as something that they use on a day to day. Same as again, as a manager, you don’t need to always have the same knowledge or better knowledge than all your employees.

You are lucky if you have an employee that actually is smarter than you, most managers would admit to that. 

Marian: That´s right. Well actually we´re all using. Google Maps or Ways, to go from one base to the other and we have no idea that it’s full of AI. My mom uses. So, it makes total sense. Thank you very much for joining us today Maor and I hope we can have you again in the future. Thanks a lot. 

 Maor: Thank you Mariano 

Marian: Bye-bye.