SVP, Marketing

There’s an Alert for That: Why We Built Connex Alerts

It goes without saying that the digital marketing world is becoming increasingly automated, with advertising platforms like Facebook and Google making more optimization decisions in real time and marketers having less hands-on-keyboard control of every action that takes place. (For more on the topic of automation in advertising, check out our CEO Larry Fisher’s thought-provoking piece on the importance of real-time data for tomorrow’s marketer.) 

At Rise, we have seen the reality of this real-time data world coming for many years, and we’ve been building solutions to help our clients stay three steps ahead of their competitors. A number of observations led us down the innovation path we’ve been pursuing:

  1. Marketers need to be able to provide each advertising platform as much information as possible for their bidding algorithms to make spend decisions that drive brands’ business goals. Think: margin information, offline conversion data, phone sales, and more. 

  2. Each advertising platform (Google, Facebook, Amazon, The Trade Desk, etc.) will only report on the results it has visibility to (its own), meaning performance numbers that may appear impressive within the platform interface may not necessarily be moving the needle for businesses.

  3. To make smart decisions about how to spend dollars as the number of channels and platforms continues to expand, marketers need to wrangle all of the data into one view to make sense of it – as step one.

  4. Making sense of data from dozens of platforms requires a serious technology solution, and marketers who spend too many human hours homing in on insights will fall behind those that leverage technology to identify opportunities both within and across channels at scale. In short: the marketer who can get to the answer and act the fastest will win.

Taking all of these factors into account, we knew that the role of agencies and media analysts would have to evolve to be relevant and add value for advertisers. What we realized was that as the platforms automate more optimization levers, the magic that smart, analytical marketers bring to the process is the ability to translate business knowledge to data points and insights that matter, and in turn configure technology with the right criteria to ‘sound the alarm’ and be notified of specific actions to take to drive the greatest impact. The best solution would manage by exception and provide marketers with the exact actions to take based on data from every platform.

Enter: Connex Alerts, the latest product of Rise’s laser-focus on the specific actions to take that will grow our clients’ businesses. This eliminates once and for all the noise of disparate data sets, and instead shifting the focus to acting, in real time, on value-driving opportunities as they present themselves. Based on the business goals of our clients – be it profitable sales on marketplaces, or new customer acquisition, or revenue growth – our team builds a media plan in lockstep with specific Connex Alerts that will tell Risers in real time where the plan is working and driving business outcomes, and where it is not. Below is an example of what this looks like in action:



Connex Alerts can be configured for data and trends across platforms and within platforms, across business units or within business units, for certain markets or geographies, for specific promotional campaigns, and an endless list of other customizable slices of performance insights that surface high impact actions we should be taking in our clients’ accounts.

We’re excited about Connex Alerts, and we’re just getting started with unlocking their power and developing even more creative and innovative insights to configure. Follow along with this series of “There’s an Alert for That” posts, where we will deep-dive on how Connex Alerts add value for marketers across goal types and industries.

05/10/2021 at 06:00