We had this wonderful opportunity of speaking with Manish Mittal, Co-founder and President of Incivus. Incivus is a creative Intelligence platform that helps marketers predict the success of their creatives before they go live. Incivus is unique because it is the only platform that evaluates all creative variables of an ad and tells the marketer why their ad will be successful or not.
Incivus’ philosophy is to augment creativity with the help of AI.
Let’s take a closer look at Incivus from Manish himself.
- Manish, can you start by describe your background and the company’s history in detail.
I am extremely passionate about utilizing emerging technologies to redefine human experiences. I cherish every opportunity to unlearn, relearn, and ignite new thinking for solutions that are a game changer.
I co-founded Incivus with a vision to transform the perception technology space by bringing meaningful disruption to the $600+ bn advertising industry. During my 20+ years of working in Applied AI, Analytics, Market Research, and evolving AI business landscape, I have experienced that the best outcomes come through empathic problem definition and continuously seeking better ways to do things.
Incivus is a Creative Intelligence Platform for marketers. Incivus helps them evaluate the perception of ads at scale, launch campaigns faster, and maximize their ad spend. Using AI, we provide a precise, objective, and granular evaluation of all creative variables of an ad. Incivus is a spin-off from Course 5 Intelligence, a 20-year-old analytics and insights organization.
- What do you want to achieve in the workplace and what does your company expect from its employees?
At Incivus, we are building a workplace where each employee is curious, passionate, think innovatively, and is agile. Each employee is a brand ambassador for Incivus and believes strongly in what we are building and the problem we are solving.
- What are your greatest company and team asset?
Our biggest asset is our product and its vision. It gives marketers the confidence to choose the right ads before they go live and helps them answer “why” their ads are working or not working, allowing them to optimize the right creative variables to make the ad successful. The platform evaluates ads on a frame-by-frame level, helping marketers identify which frame, and which creative variable worked for them. Currently, there is no such tool that answers these questions for marketers, and we are excited to be building it.
Our second biggest asset is our team, a team that walks in each day thinking innovation, thinking about how to solve the problem in the right way, quickly and effectively for marketers. We have a dynamic, young, talented, and very passionate team that I am proud to be working with.
- What steps have you taken to get where you are in your career?
I have always had an itch for how I can solve a customer problem in a better way. If I go back to the early days of my career, customers did not have enough data to make decisions, and hence market research came into play. As we progressed through the years, there was an influx of data and customers did not know which data to choose or how to understand it and we made systems that would answer those questions, and then we moved to smarter tech in the form of AI. However, throughout this whole journey, my focus has always been, on how do I solve better for the customer problem now and at the same time, continue to think about how that problem will evolve in the next 10-15 years.
- What is your motivation for starting this company?
I have always been a proponent of positive disruption. When we began building the solution, I knew that our platform and our technology will be disruptive and will change the marketing ecosystem and the way creatives are made. AI was and continues to evolve and we knew that this is the right time to start building and creating breakthrough value using the right technology.
- What are some of the obstacles you’ve faced in achieving your goals?
We started during the pandemic with a novel idea and hence obstacles were bound to be a part of the journey. However, we were prepared to face it with agility and with the mindset of solving the problem for the customer.
We knew that when we are building a product of this nature, there is a massive education, trust, and adoption journey for the product. And at this stage, we are trying to find the fine balance between educating the customer enough about the use of the product and helping them integrate it into their creative development journey.
Today, customers utilize our product in various ways like identifying the top-performing or bottom-performing ads from a set of ad campaigns, evaluating the impact of one creative variable (music, ad copy or human presence) on the success of their ads, and identifying the right music for their ads and eventually developing their brand sound and many more.
- How best would you describe yourself in just one word?
Curious
- What gives you a sense of purpose and direction on Mondays?
The fact that we are disrupting the advertising industry and bringing about a meaningful change every day gives me a sense of purpose and direction, not just on a Monday but on all days of the week. For me each day, each minute is about working towards that goal.
- What was the most innovative or creative project that you worked on?
The most innovative project will have to be Incivus. Not only is the product innovation is novel but the technology that is being used, the information that it will provide to the marketers, and the problems that it is solving, is also very new and something that is not done earlier.
- What key values helped you overcome obstacles in your career? Tell us a story about the most memorable incident in which you demonstrated leadership.
For a couple of years of my professional life, I was based in UAE, heading the MENA region at an organization. The time when I joined – around September of 2008, rescission had hit the world badly, and more so the financial industry which happen to be the biggest clientele of our company. Sales were badly hit, and existing clients were pulling out of the engagement. At that time, I reached out to each customer and ensured that without spending anything extra with us, will ensure extra services and were able to present to them the plan which will improve their profitability. This was tailor-made for each customer depending on the concerns they were facing. We were so certain of our strategy that with some customers we even agreed to be paid, once they started seeing the results. This helped us retain most of our key customers in the region and was helpful to scale with them the moment market started improving. This experience taught me the importance of thinking out of the box and being agile in situations.
- What makes your company’s services/solutions or products unique? What is coming soon in terms of new offerings and innovations?
Incivus is an AI-based Creative Intelligence Platform for marketers and evaluates all formats of ads, right from video, audio, text, or display ads.
Incivus provides a quick yet actionable evaluation of ads, allowing marketers to understand not just which ad will perform well but to tell them why it will perform well and what is the audience’s perception of the ad. The evaluation is based on creative parameters like colours, ad copy, music, emotions, brand cues, and human presence. This platform can be used by creative teams to augment their creative development process, digital marketing teams to pick the right ads before launch, analytics teams to optimize ad spending, and the CMO to understand the perception of their ad campaigns and hence their brand.
Our USP:
- We help marketers unearth the “why” for campaign success, helping them create a repeatable formula for success. Our tool helps marketers launch campaigns with the confidence that they will be successful.
- Technology: We are using technologies like NLP, Computer Vision, Computer Audition, and a lot of human perception data to build our dataset and our platform. This helps us make accurate predictions for ad success.
Coming soon:
- Keyframe technology: Technology used to identify which are the most memorable frames/images in a video. This will allow marketers to know which frames will resonate the most with their target audience and help them create a sub-edit for longer videos.
- Category and Channel-based insights: We will be providing category-based and channel-based insights to improve ad success.