Rachel Conforti, VP of Marketing at LoopMe is a media and marketing professional with over 15 years experience of proven success at driving effective programs delivering high results, spanning across corporate marketing, branding, PR strategy, thought leadership initiatives, lead generation, and strategic events.
Communicator extraordinaire, experienced storyteller and natural leader. She Runs It brand ambassador and mentor, active runner and media relations professional.
Media 7: What inspired you to get into Marketing? What is your favorite marketing word(s)?
Rachel Conforti: I’ve always had a passion for advertising, even reciting commercials as a kid over and over again (much to the demise of my parents)! After graduating from Binghamton University in NY I briefly thought about journalism as a career, but as I didn’t know many people in this area and it was hard to break into, I pivoted to look for roles in advertising, eventually landing a job within the out-of-home industry, at what is now known as Outfront Media.
After making the transition from out-of-home advertising to ad technology in the late 2000s, I’ve held various roles within
B2B Marketing. For the past 20 years, I’ve covered everything from product marketing, sales enablement and marketing communications, to public relations and content marketing. I was fortunate to work alongside some of the best
AdTech leaders while I was at 24/7 Real Media. That is where I began my journey into digital AdTech, and got to see the industry mature and evolve.
Throughout my career, I’ve been at
Tremor Video,
DoubleVerify and
Innovid, at various inflection points on their respective journeys, all leading up to my current role as global VP of marketing at LoopMe.
"LoopMe is at an exciting crossroads where AI meets advertising to drive towards business outcomes"
M7: Could you tell us something about your role at LoopMe?
RC: As VP of Marketing, I run global marketing for LoopMe, an organization where technology and artificial intelligence are at the core of our business. The nearly nine year old UK-based company is experiencing a massive growth period fueled by its U.S. expansion, and the opportunity to join this growing business was very exciting for me. The team at LoopMe has done a tremendous job of building a great platform, with products that work for our clients, and I’m lucky to be able to share that story with the world. In the past year, we had to pivot our plans quickly due to the pandemic and I was lucky enough to work with smart marketing team members to help adapt quickly and swiftly.
We launched a COVID-19 content hub with weekly snapshots on consumer behavior during the pandemic (March - June 2020) to help customers navigate the 'new normal' and better understand their advertising strategies to connect with consumers. We also switched all our event plans into virtual events, onboarded new software for our teams to collaborate around the globe and doubled down on our content efforts. I’m extremely pleased to be part of this organization and was able to promote nearly all the members of the team this year, despite the pandemic, as they have been so incredibly valuable to our success.
M7: What are the services by LoopMe which includes Artificial Intelligence in them?
RC: LoopMe is at an exciting crossroads where AI meets advertising to drive towards business outcomes. LoopMe was the first in the industry to apply AI to marketing outcomes, from impacting how people feel about brands to what they do after they have been exposed to an ad. LoopMe measures and optimizes at every stage of the marketing funnel, from brand to performance.
We started out mainly working in upper funnel measurement, where we launched our own survey tool to identify in-market customers, as well as to measure behavioral and attitudinal indicators that will help our clients better understand how a campaign is resonating.
Our AI then creates a predictive model of consumers that are more likely to take an action, based on hundreds of attributes. We then serve ads to those consumers which are most likely to convert, a decision that’s made in real-time on each ad request.
Our AI optimizes for outcomes such as upper funnel measures, like awareness, purchase intent, and consideration, as well as lower funnel measures, including online conversions, store visits and actual sales. Marketers have leaned into these outcomes-based programs because they provide better results during the actual campaign (as opposed to measuring success after the campaign has ended) and this has powered our growth as we continue to innovate in applying AI across new areas, such as connected TV, data and analytics.
LoopMe’s DMP has over 2.6 billion devices, which covers 250M unique profiles in the U.S. We connect these using our HH graph to 90M households. Our DMP is enhanced with over 2 million opt-in survey respondents each year and robust data partnerships.
Through our flagship product PurchaseLoop, we’re able to help brands with any strategy that they may have within the funnel, which proved extremely important over the past year as many brands needed to quickly pivot from lower funnel to upper funnel campaigns.
"We like to involve our customers in our marketing efforts to highlight their success and provide valuable insights to their peer sets on how outcomes-based advertising can be done most effectively."
M7: What marketing channels do you use and which ones do you see as the most promising given your target customers?
RC: As a B2B marketing team, we use a combination of ad trade PR, paid advertising, webinars, content marketing and demand generation programs across email, social media and our owned channels. We like to involve our customers in our marketing efforts to highlight their success and provide valuable insights to their peer sets on how outcomes-based advertising can be done most effectively.
Most recently, we’ve spoken at an AdAge webinar on outcomes for connected TV during the Ad Age Streaming Next event, and we’ve hosted an Adweek webinar on Optimizing your Advertising for Outcomes.
M7: Could you tell us about a recent unique campaign by LoopMe which was a huge success?
RC:The Pennsylvania Lottery, iLotto, wanted to drive awareness of online accessibility for Powerball and MegaMillions and drive new account registrations for their online platform.
Through LoopMe’s PurchaseLoop Solution, we were able to drive an incremental lift in brand sentiment, while delivering conversions through account sign-ups. Our client wanted to differentiate from online metrics and real-world outcomes - and not rely on digital proxies to measure campaign effectiveness. LoopMe’s solution used AI to target the key audiences using predictive modelling based on site visitors and by retargeting existing site visitors who had not registered for an account. By leveraging LoopMe’s award-winning PurchaseLoop technology, we ran a PurchaseLoop Brand Lift study to measure and optimize towards awareness.
LoopMe established a control and exposed group and surveyed users during the campaign. Our PurchaseLoop AI survey technology was used to analyze digital footprints and data characteristics of those who responded, and actively target a predictive audience based on positive respondents.
LoopMe’s in-house creative team built custom rich media and dynamic display ads for mobile, desktop and tablet devices. Our creative strategy proved to generate strong media results and user engagement in a brand safe environment.
As a result, the campaign saw double digit lift in brand awareness and thousands of new account registrations.
"LoopMe has a unique advantage in the market as our product suite includes a proprietary survey tool that can potentially reach 250M Americans."
M7: How has the COVID-19 pandemic affected your work - what day to day processes have you had to re-tool to be able to pull them off remotely?
RC: We’ve had to pivot plans quickly to adapt to the new normal during the COVID-19 pandemic, but we were able to reallocate budget and resources to best serve the needs of the company and achieve 40% growth in 1H '20 in part due to marketing efforts.
As I run a global team, we instituted daily sync calls with our team leads and are diligent about tracking our projects in Asana. We also have team happy hours, more frequent company wide calls and have launched better software tools to encourage collaboration.
Personally, it’s been a daily balance of time management, negotiations, patience and nontraditional working hours to raise my four year old son and work remotely with my husband.
M7: How do you anticipate what people will want?
RC: LoopMe has a unique advantage in the market as our product suite includes a proprietary survey tool that can potentially reach 250M Americans. We deploy this on a regular basis to ask consumers how they feel about brands, or other activity as it relates to the pandemic, to identify attitudinal and behavioral shifts. We produce these on a regular basis on behalf of our customers and more broadly to better inform the market of seasonal trends and behaviors. You can read all of them here on our COVID-19 Insights Hub.
M7: What is your superpower?
RC: I’m a connector. Whatever it may be, I’ll find a way to make a connection -- between co-workers, between companies looking to do co-marketing campaigns or personally to help find people their significant other! I enjoy mentoring others and have been heavily involved in She Runs It over the past ten years, currently serving as a She Runs It Brand Ambassador that helps to connect new members with the benefits of the organization.
ABOUT LOOPME
LoopMe, the leading outcomes-based platform, closes the loop on digital advertising. By leveraging AI to optimize media delivery in real-time, we drive measurable uplift for business outcomes and more effective advertising across online and offline marketing goals, including brand lift, purchase intent, consideration, foot traffic and sales. LoopMe was founded in 2012 with the mission to create better consumer experiences through innovation, powered by data, in order to bring people and brands together. The company is headquartered in the UK, with 11 global offices across New York, Boston, Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Toronto, Singapore, Dnipro (Ukraine) and Hong Kong. For more information, please visit www.loopme.com.