A sudden change in the weather has a ripple effect. When a heavy rain rolls in unexpectedly, it can cause Uber prices to soar, traffic to snarl and pedestrians to abandon all semblance of sidewalk law to walk under awnings avoiding the rain.
Of course, it also triggers a flood of searches for “umbrella” and boatloads of cash spent on them as people prepare themselves for the next rainstorm. For marketers, that’s a prime opportunity to land new customers, assuming they can jump on the trend fast enough. But they’re often still polishing copy and finding links by the time the clouds clear.
Sentic Technologies automates processes like this. By taking a flow of real-time information and combining it with conversations happening across the web, product inventories and other intelligence, it helps to quickly capture marketing opportunities without human intervention.
It’s not just weather that Sentic can help marketers respond to — it works on everything from celebrity tweets to breaking news. The ads it is able to place range from search ads to promoted social posts.
“At the end of the day, it's all based on data feeds,” said CEO and co-founder Pini Pur. “If Miley Cyrus is wearing blue mascara, now everyone is talking and tweeting about Miley Cyrus, blue mascara — we can extract those keywords and automatically add them to your description or adjust bid prices based on existing inventory.”
Sentic is even using machine learning to optimize campaigns to ensure that the system isn’t tripped up by irrelevant terms. For example, the system knows that sunscreen isn’t in high demand when it’s winter, even if mentions of “sun” are on the rise.
Pur founded the company in 2014 along with his CTO, who now sits in Israel leading the company’s research and development firm. The Chicago office, which serves as the headquarters, houses eight employees, including sales, operations and marketing staff.
“We really believe in our people here,” Pur said. “Each one is like a founder, they’re so dedicated to the vision. And our clients are doing business with the people, so we really value them.”
Sentic raised a $1.79 million seed round in 2015 and is gearing up for a second this year. The company hopes to offer more features for its product as well, including growing its presence in voice and visual search — something Pur sees as a growing opportunity in the marketing world. But at the end of the day, he hopes that his company’s tech will be able to match whatever audience a marketer wants to hit by joining conversations as soon as they happen.
Image via Sentic
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