Inscape founder Zeev Neumeier is bringing his AI-powered venture Gray Swan out of stealth mode and into beta testing.
Gray Swan is a service powered by artificial intelligence that aims to help marketers better optimize their connected TV campaigns by exploring potential problem areas, including bad pricing setups, supply and demand partner “degrades” and errant winning and non-winning bids.
The name “Gray Swan” was inspired by the book “The Black Swan” by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, which examines once-thought improbable events with massive scale and unpredictability that are rationalized after the fact using logic and data.
At the TV of Tomorrow Show in San Francisco earlier this year, Neumeier said Gray Swan works in the same realm by vacuuming up data from its partners and clients, then examining that data to find the “gray swans” using artificial intelligence and visualized data models.
“There are a lot of very complicated things that happen with all these systems,” Neumeier said. “You look at all the data coming in across CTV systems — there’s 1,000 things happening in the local system — to figure out which things are important, which things are not important, which things pop.”
People who are tasked with finding abnormalities in campaign spending and returns often “spend their lives wasting away, staring at dashboards, looking for little wiggles in the line.”
Gray Swan aims to take the guesswork out of that process by leveraging AI to scour for abnormalities that can be easily digested by key decision-makers across all points in the process.
While operating in stealth mode, Gray Swan has already helped a number of connected TV publishers and partners evaluate their campaigns to look for areas of improvement in performance. The names of those publishers were not disclosed, but Gray Swan marked the impact as “double-digit improvements.”
