We caught up with Dave Katz, the co-founder of Intuizi, a privacy-first audience insight and analytics platform, to talk all things about the company, why it was founded, the future of Intuizi, and more…
What is Intuizi?
Intuizi is a privacy-first audience insight and analytics platform, built for the post-cookie and post-idfa-deprecated world. We help businesses to make more money, to waste less money (with their ad spend) and/or – perhaps even more importantly – to better plan their businesses. They do this from gaining a deeper insight into their audiences, and their competitors audiences – from both their own data, which we have amazing smarts on knowing how to process – and from anonymised data from other parties. They can then target advertising to relevant devices based on what they’ve seen, again, in a way which is compliant with privacy laws such as GDPR and CCPA. This means that they can be more granular with creative messaging based on a far greater understanding of what their existing customers do in the real world, as well as knowing who might look like a customer – as well as who might never be one. Outside of advertising, they get to see what is happening in the actual world and plan bricks and mortar premises and supply chains based on what we can show them – such as ‘where should i put my next store’ or ‘in which places are my competitors currently driving far more business than i am?’, for instance.
Why now?
At the start of 2020, I put together an opinion piece for an ad industry publication, by interviewing various business leaders from the digital industry. Across 20 varied questions, the broadest consensus was the answer to the question ‘what type of digital business needs to be built in 2020’, the answer to which was essentially ‘a business which can take all the rich first party data from publishers and enable advertisers to gain insight/targeting from that, without breaking GDPR’ – essentially, that’s what Intuizi is.
Is this why you started the business?
No, not really – my three co-founders were already ahead of the curve on that, the article just confirmed the importance of what was already being built!
How has it been working as a group of 4 during lockdown, it must be difficult to meet up – is now not a terrible time to start a business?
Well – in all fairness, I’ve literally only ever met one of them, and the last time we were in the same country as one another was 2 years ago – the other two, I’m not sure if we’ve ever been on the same continent at the same time – but it’s a blast! I worked for myself for most of the 5 years before 2020 began, so being part of a team that meets every day, albeit virtually, is an upgrade on working solo. It’s not without its challenges, but we’re jelling, and the rewards are starting to come. It does help that two of the others have worked together in different US states for 20 years, and the third has been with them since 2013 – i’m the new boy (and the only Brit).
How is Intuizi different from the competition?
As far as we can tell – there isn’t really any competition. I don’t mean that arrogantly – but having spent much of the last 5 years advising some of the worlds biggest clients on their data tech strategy, having been used by google to train their clients on transformation through programmatic advertising, and being one of the people who led joint-industry regulation in the UK, I think I’m in a good position to know who else does what and to help navigate that – the point of our business is that we can more or less onboard any consented smartphone data, process it at high speed and low cost, create new ways of analysing it and find matches without ever revealing PII – happy to be corrected if someone else out there reckons they are already doing this. There are a variety of great businesses doing some of the things we do (none as well as us, of course) – but we are unique in our overall proposition.
What would you say you have learned from your experiences so far?
I have always been ok with the idea of ‘hustling’ – the hard-work ethic you need when starting something new, the daily requirement to speak to everyone you can, let ambivalence flow over you like water off a ducks back, and the need to ‘keep on going’ when you would rather make a cuf ot coffee instead of another phone call – but doing so during a pandemic is not without fresh challenges. Whilst these are uncharted waters for everyone patience is a virtue, and I’ve had to learn more of that – being a father of three boys meant I had some already, but apparently nowhere near enough, because it does take time to sell-in a complex and unrivalled proposition to people who are under immense pressure as half of their colleagues – sometimes including senior decision makers – are on furlough, and the business might fold if they don’t make smart moves with every penny and every minute they have at their disposal – so it’s been a great learning curve!
What does growth look like for Intuizi?
We have a plan, but we also have the flexibility built in both to our platform, and our mindset – we will do what it takes to continuously improve our product, to keep taking it to all potentially relevant parties, and to win as much as possible – we know that what we have built is an incredible tool – not just for ‘buying better advertising’ but for planning businesses in general – and at a time where there is so much scrutiny on every penny and every minute – well, we can be invaluable – our ability to work with data which already exists in a business, in order to ensure that the business can learn and make better decisions from that data- this couldn’t be a better time to be launching – the plan is to think big and be bigger – one step at a time.
