MarTech Interview with Fredrik Skantze, Founder and CEO of Funnel

Fredrik, we’re delighted to have you at MarTech Cube. Can you share your journey to founding Funnel and your experience in marketing intelligence?

Absolutely, and thank you for having me!

I originally entered the world of work immediately after my Masters degree in engineering at MIT where I found there to be a vibrant culture of technological innovation. I worked in software development and R&D in robotics and then went back to university to do an MBA at Stanford in 1998.

Here, I began wanting to start a company, my idea being to bring AI and robotics to the toy industry to develop a new line of toys. In LA, I worked with the high-tech team at Mattel, the world’s largest toy manufacturer, commercializing some of the technologies emerging from the MIT Media Lab – an incredible experience. However, I learned that it was too early for AI in toy manufacturing and that the internet would change things forever. I joined a mobile internet startup in product management to continue broadening my experience.

I left to start my first company in 2005, an eCommerce firm selling used cars in London, leaving Silicon Valley behind. We raised €27 million in venture capital funding and built a relatively large company. The whole process got me really interested in company building: creating a company is one step further along from creating a product for a business you work for and after that, I never looked back.

Before Funnel, we built a Facebook Advertising Tool for the SME market called Qwaya. It completed around $100 million in advertising spend on Facebook, about 1% of their revenue at the time, and we were the first SME tool in that market. However, we didn’t feel we could scale the business as much as we would have liked so we pivoted to Funnel. We crafted a data intelligence tool specifically for marketers — who hitherto hadn’t been catered to — to transform marketing teams’ spending efficiency and performance.

In your opinion, what are the key factors driving the growing need for marketing intelligence in today’s advertising landscape?

We believe that while today’s business intelligence tools and cloud data warehouses are fantastic for technical analysts and IT teams, marketers have been far less thought about and struggle to use the tools without a technical team supporting them. Marketers and advertisers also require new methods of predicting user behavior which by extension necessitates more advanced statistical expertise — skills that most agencies do not yet possess.

Funnel empowers marketers to directly get access to their data without technical help. Our Data Hub does this by automatically importing data, making it business-ready, staging it, and presenting it in a dashboard for the marketer. Marketers therefore fulfill their data needs themselves and can act with certainty to quickly iterate towards higher marketing performance, often with much better results in a short period.

How do increased costs for digital ads, decreased visibility on ad impact, and quickly changing customer behaviors due to macro events affect companies’ marketing strategies?

In the last couple of years, Big Tech and regulatory bodies have turned up the temperature on companies and their marketing strategies. Businesses can no longer track and profile individual online consumers across multiple websites due to the sunsetting of third-party cookie technology.

This, in turn, has a knock-on effect on companies needing to shift away from last-click attribution to more advanced forms of modeling and analytics, such as Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) and Incrementality Testing. Suffice it to say, lessened visibility on ad spend impact and often-volatile consumer behavior means that performance marketing is going to have to go through a profound methodological change in the next few years.

How does Funnel’s platform help businesses consolidate marketing data from all channels and suggest revenue attribution to different channels and campaigns?

The core of Funnel is our proprietary Data Hub which allows marketers to collect data in real time from all relevant marketing platforms and then model that data so that it is ready for analysis. With over 500 connectors, Funnel’s platform offers marketers the most customisable data collection. Visualizations in the dashboards are tailor-made for marketing analytics and provide advanced measurement capabilities: there are few, if any, marketing platforms that offer the same kind of empowerment over data as Funnel.

As such, when it comes to revenue attribution, our platform is designed to make suggestions as to how marketing spend increases the reach, visibility, engagement and trust in companies’ brands rather than just focusing on ROI. The Funnel platform therefore synthesizes marketing data and turns it into an action plan for ensuring customers’ products are top of mind when needed by consumers.

Can you explain how the recent acquisition of Adtriba enhances Funnel’s capabilities, particularly in terms of marketing measurement?

Our recent acquisition of Adtriba greatly enhances our product offering, the core Data Hub and its clear visualization, to offer more advanced marketing analytics. As has been mentioned, it’s increasingly complicated today to collect, analyze and measure marketing data from online and offline channels. Now, our customers can access market-first integrated measurement technology, based on Adtriba’s capabilities, in one unified platform.

Adtriba’s software will be fully integrated into our marketing intelligence platform for measurement and ‘triangulation’ through blending the MMM, multi-touch attribution (MTA) and incrementality testing methodologies. Combining these methodologies is the best way to measure marketing activities accurately, determining what spend is working and why. More businesses are shifting from performance marketing to holistic full-funnel approaches and it is therefore crucial to track marketing spending impact, particularly in the upper funnel.

Measurement has also been largely inaccessible to companies due to its perceived cost, complexity, and lack of real-time updates. Restrictions on third-party cookies, privacy and data collection on iOS and Android, and relying on last-click tracking have all made measuring more difficult. Adtriba’s proprietary, machine-learning-powered technology makes measurement faster, more affordable, and more accurate, removing barriers to entry for marketers — this holistic marketing measurement has historically been the preserve of larger enterprises.

How does Funnel’s platform utilize Marketing Mix Modelling, Multi-touch Attribution, and Incrementality Testing to provide comprehensive marketing intelligence?

For MMM, our platform uses statistical models to measure the impact of various marketing activities on business outcomes, such as sales and ROI. Data scattered across thousands of advertisement accounts is collected and formatted on an automated schedule, with our models recalibrated and updated to account for market changes and shifting consumer behavior and business strategies.

MTA provides granular data on a campaign and creative level, working with similar data sets and being mostly probabilistic in its methodology, instead of deterministic. It helps with in-channel optimization and tuning and indicates the share of brand and non-brand search conversions for businesses. Incrementality testing, put simply, involves estimating the additional impact of a specific campaign or activity by comparing the results of a test group exposed to the campaign with a control group that was not.

Funnel’s secret sauce for comprehensive marketing intelligence derives from the triangulation of the strengths of all three methods (see visualization below):

What strategies does Funnel recommend for companies looking to optimize their marketing budgets in a landscape with reduced marketing budgets and less reliable data?

Advanced analytics are the new way forward to compensate for restricted access to data and diminishing marketing budgets. As marketing measurement becomes increasingly influenced by AI, machine learning and SaaS, advanced analytics are actually becoming less expensive and more scalable, making them accessible to a wider range of players.

Agency partners and intelligence platforms such as Funnel can help lead this transition in marketing strategies. With even well-resourced marketing teams often needing more money to pay for a full-time statistician or advanced technologist, agencies and platforms can spread the costs of domain experts across multiple clients.

What personal strategies or principles guide your approach to leading Funnel and driving innovation in marketing intelligence?

In building a business the most important thing is to gather a great team, point them in the right direction with a clear mission and make sure they work well together as a unit.

With our mission to help marketers evaluate and improve their marketing, we have a clear focus for the company. In addition, we spend a lot of time building and talking about our culture. At the core of the culture is teamwork. Everything we do, we do together. We have gone to great lengths to facilitate teamwork including removing bonuses for the sales team. This has ensured everyone works together and we even have salespeople co-selling. Other important aspects of our culture are creating wow for customers, moving fast and constantly learning and improving.

Based on your experience, what advice would you give to businesses looking to improve their marketing measurement and intelligence capabilities?

The foundation is to be on top of your marketing data. All businesses might not have the marketing spend or maturity to realize the value of more advanced measurement solutions, but every business that does some kind of marketing benefits from having a Marketing Data Hub. So my advice is to make sure your marketing data is business-ready and that marketers in your organization are empowered to work autonomously with their data. That is how you prove, improve and predict the impact of your marketing efforts.

In closing, what final thoughts or key messages would you like to share about the future of marketing intelligence and the role of data-driven decision-making in achieving marketing success?

For marketers to have a greater impact, be given more influence, and by consequence, larger budgets, marketers need to demonstrate the impact of their marketing. With the signal loss from the deprecation of cookies and cross-device tracking this has become more difficult. However, by combining a Data Hub to collect all their data with a Measurement Solution to use advanced statistical and machine learning algorithms to build an attribution model marketers, we can optimize and demonstrate the impact of their marketing. The results can be profound on the performance of a business.