Raised – Affiliate Marketing Programs

Crypto.com spent $700 million to put their name on a stadium in downtown Los Angeles. Mastercard is a sponsor of the PGA Tour. Dunkin Donuts hired Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez to star in a Super Bowl ad. Companies spend billions on marketing every year, but the question remains whether these campaigns translate into profits.

San Francisco-based startup Alembic is employing big data techniques developed for contact tracing during the pandemic to answer those questions. The company today announced a $14 million Series A that included Jeffery Katzenberg, NFL-star-turned-VC Joe Montana, and Braze co-founder Mark Ghermezian.

“If you spend a dollar does it actually produce an outcome? Until recently the best you could do was be in the ballpark,” said Katzenberg, former head of Walt Disney Studios, a founder of DreamWorks, and backer of Alembic through his venture fund WndrCo.

Katzenberg says that over the years he’s spent billions of dollars on marketing with no way of knowing if he was getting anything for his money. He compares traditional techniques for measuring the effect of marketing campaigns to “putting a finger in the air.”

But recent advances in AI and big data technology, he says, have made it possible to track the impact of marketing spend on a granular level, in real time.

“For every CMO, it’s somewhere between the holy grail, the fountain of youth, and the meaning of life,” said Katzenberg, “this was not doable a year or two ago.”

CEO Tomas Puig says that Alembic is using techniques developed by epidemiologists to track the spread to Covid-19 but applying that technology to calculating return on investment for marketing spend.

“Everybody talks about how MRNA is the only thing to come out of the pandemic in terms of technology, but that’s not true,” said Puig. The company uses AI models to crunch massive troves of anonymized data—everything from location data, to scrapes of televisions broadcasts, to proprietary customer data—to track exactly how much of an impact a company is gettin from a particular campaign.

“We can tell you tomorrow, did that actually have an effect or if it doesn’t, how much money are you burning by not pausing the campaign,” said Puig.

He says the company currently has about a dozen customers, including trillion-dollar chipmaker Nvidia, which is using the technology to guide its marketing efforts.

“It allows us to increase productivity in ways not possible before,” said Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.

Though still early days for Alembic, it’s just the latest example of how rapidly progressing AI technology promises to upend entrenched legacy industries like corporate marketing.