Available to the general public since last November, the artificial intelligence application Hippoc is off to a great start on the marketing tools market, with already a thousand users in 32 countries, partnerships with major marketing agencies and a $3 million investment from a venture capital fund (Colvest Management and Distinction Capital). Interview.
In the press release, the Montreal start-up calls itself “revolutionary”… like many companies that manipulate AI. But what else? The founders have developed an artificial intelligence algorithm to predict the “visual” impact of marketing campaigns.
What Jean-Maxime, my partner, discovered during his master’s degree is that the neural systems that process attention and encode visual stimuli in the brain are systems that can be modeled – from an AI point of view,” summarizes Kévin Combe, co-founder of the company.
The rest goes like this: rather than looking for a solution to a problem, the PhD candidate is put in search of a problem to solve with the “intelligent” eye he had developed. And after talking to executives in several industries, he came to the conclusion that the market with the best business case was in marketing.
In marketing, people waste a lot of time validating their ads with AB tests before rolling them out on Facebook,” explains Jean-Maxime Larouche. Then in agencies, creatives waste precious time arguing among themselves about which visuals will work best with an audience.”
The Hippoc application – whose name comes from the word Hippocampus, designating a region of the brain that “plays a central role in memory and spatial navigation” – was trained with a database of 35,000 people who were exposed to 16 million images and videos (and whose reactions were recorded using sensors).
In concrete terms, the result is an application in which marketers or freelancers can upload their campaign visuals to obtain a re-calibration of the visual and textual elements, aiming to optimize the impact on potential customers. And this, according to a choice of three marketing objectives: increase awareness, sales or digital reach.
And the reported results are amazing. According to the founders, the app has managed to reduce the cost per click of some campaigns “by up to 50%” – through its recommendations.
By offering a flat fee of $30 per month, Hippoc’s leaders want to democratize their tool, putting it in the hands of as many self-employed and small business owners as possible, who do their own marketing.
The tool is useful in the hands of advertising professionals, Combe adds.
With our large company packages, we will be able to use their campaign data to train our models. This will help them predict their media performance.
Integration in progress
For Hippoc, the challenge of the next few months will be integration. The platform is currently compatible with Canva, but the founders also want to integrate their solution with major digital advertising platforms, including Sigma, Adobe, Facebook, Google and Twitter.
