#48 - Peyman Nilforoush, CEO of inPowered - How AI transforms ineffective advertising into highly relevant engagement

This podcast interview focuses on the product innovation that has the power to transform the advertising industry and the way marketers can make a remarkable impact, and my guest is Peyman Nilforoush.

Peyman is the CEO and CoFounder of inPowered, which is the AI-driven content amplification platform of choice for the world’s largest brands. inPowered has been named the 2018 OMMA awards finalist for Artificial Intelligence and Native Advertising, the best content amplification platform by Digiday, and one of the top tech marketing companies to watch by VentureBeat.

Peyman, along with his brother Pirouz, previously founded NetShelter in 1999, which became the world’s largest technology property on the web before being acquired by Ziff Davis in 2013. The company’s fast growth earned numerous distinctions in the Inc 500|1000, Deloitte Technology Fast 500, Profit 100 and the San Francisco Business Times Fast 100.

He’s a visionary tech and media entrepreneur who has been a featured TV guest on Fox Business with Maria Bartiromo, BNN and quoted regularly in the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and was named to the 2010 Who’s Who in Business Publishing by BtoBOnline’s Media Business Magazine. He was also a recipient of Profit 100’s Young Entrepreneur Award for being the youngest CEO on the Profit 100 list of fastest growing companies in 2009.

The claim on the InPowered website states this: “We help brands discover and amplify credible, trusted content so that they can contribute to a more informed marketplace.”

This triggered me, hence I invited Peyman to my podcast. We explore what’s broken in the advertising industry, and how this is resulting in single-sided benefits for only the advertising platforms. We then dive into an approach that not only transforms the way we’ll advertise in the future, but also the way we have to step up our marketing game in general.

Here are some of his quotes:

What we saw in the journey leading up to imPowered was essentially interruptive advertising not working.

You're looking at point 0.05 percent, not 0.5 percent, not 5%. 0.05 percent click-through rate on a banner ad on average.

And that's after using tons of technology and targeting and everything that you can imagine.

This is not about technology. This is not about targeting, it's not about audience or any of that. It's really about the form, which is when you're interrupting somebody, they simply don’t want to engage. They simply tune out.

There's got to be a way to do this in a much more consumer-friendly way. In a way that actually adds value to the consumer.

So, what if, instead of putting banner out and interrupt their experience, we actually turned articles reviews, blog posts, any kind of contents, into an ad, and we got them to read that content?

I did it as an experiment and ended up delivering a 65% increase in consideration.

It just blew every single advertising they had ever done.

By listening to this interview, you will learn three things:

1. Why, If you want to deliver real impact you’d better do away with the conventional wisdom, and approach the problem from the opposite direction.
2. That to truly disrupt a market you not only need to have excellent product, but also a revolutionary business model. Shifting from consumption to outcome-based charging, for example.
3. How it’s not only possible to deliver remarkable impact with a solution, but also create many new jobs.