Our Teams Are Constantly Monitoring And Optimizing: Infillion CPO Marcos Escalante on InfillionX’s Launch

Recently, we launched InfillionX, a full-funnel media buying product for diverse client KPIs. It’s been an exciting few weeks at the company as we’ve brought it to the world, but we’re also excited to turn inward and tell the story of the teams, leaders, and processes that brought it to life.

For example: What’s it like from the product side? We asked Infillion’s chief product officer, Marcos Escalante, to tell us a bit more about what things are like under the hood of our newest product offering.

What are you most excited about from the InfillionX launch?

Our product team is really most excited about the full extent of just how much InfillionX allows advertisers to do with a single media buy, through combining multiple Infillion solutions. With TrueX, a video engagement ad experience, you get a premium brand experience. With NeXt, you get location based intelligence that informs performance driven campaigns. With our footfall traffic measurement, we can track visits to brick-and-mortar businesses like retailers, resorts, and sports stadiums. InfillionX allows you to execute campaigns that drive brand awareness and performance based metrics, all in one package. And that’s rare.

To that point, InfillionX was built to meet a demand for truly all-in-one digital advertising – any KPI or set of KPIs, cross-platform, cross-device, from planning to flighting to measuring success. But what some people might not know is that it was also built from products that came in from both sides of the merger of TrueX and Gimbal. As a product leader, can you explain a bit about what it was like to combine products like that? What were some of the challenges?

One of the most challenging aspects of building InfillionX stems from the fact that we had to combine two well established products and workflows. From a product perspective, we can provide a continuous experience for the consumer by linking the different products with retargeting. For example, a consumer could see and engage with a TrueX video ad, then a mobile display ad via NeXt – which came from the company formerly known as Gimbal. From a workflow perspective, we have engineering and operations teams used to running campaigns separately and now they are working together to optimize for overall InfillionX campaign performance. 

From a product standpoint, what are the biggest benefits of a comprehensive solution like InfillionX rather than selecting different components for a campaign strategy?

InfillionX does the work for you instead of having to package together the different components yourself. Depending on the KPIs that you need to hit, we can recommend the right blend of products that will help you achieve your KPI targets at the right eCPM. Throughout the campaign, our teams are constantly monitoring and optimizing for best performance.

When we piloted InfillionX with a few longstanding clients, we worked with a major CPG company and its media agency on a popular food brand. This brand already had very high awareness levels – in other words, you’ve probably heard of it. That can create a stall in statistically significant mid-funnel brand lift. Think of it this way: If you’ve known about a brand for years and yet have never been a buyer of its products, it could take a lot to move you any further along the customer journey now. But the combination of ad formats and retargeting used in this InfillionX pilot campaign drove statistically significant lift in upper and middle funnel measures – including a 7% lift in familiarity and an 8% lift in brand consideration.

That’s big. And before InfillionX, you’d have had to do it with multiple media buys. That creates confusion and inefficiency – and those of us building ad products are the first to notice just how complex it gets.

What do you hope you can build into InfillionX next?

There is a long list of possible features, such as more nuanced creative sequencing, we can build next. We’re also looking forward to bringing our InStadium product, which brings advanced digital out-of-home advertising to professional sports arenas throughout the U.S. and can then make InStadium a part of the InfillionX offering. Overall, prioritization will be based on client feedback, and ultimately, what drives campaign performance.

Great creative needs a great product team.

In the ad industry, usually it’s the finished product that gets the industry to sing its praises – campaign creative, magic moments, and branding that shines. But in digital, none of that is possible without a solid product team building the foundation for ads that are accountable, that reach the right consumer at the right time, and that provide a versatile creative platform for a diverse portfolio of brands. We’re excited to share more stories from leaders behind the scenes at Infillion as we brought InfillionX to life.

Curious about the power of InfillionX? Read more about it here, and reach out if you want to learn more!