Category Design Insights: Origami Logic

Earlier this year we started working with Origami Logic, who are creating a new way to measure marketing results. Specifically, they are attacking the age old marketing measurement problem, best explained by this famous quote.

"Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, the trouble is I don't know which half." - John Wanamaker

The problem is also well articulated in this great article in The Atlantic - "A Dangerous Question - Does Internet Advertising Work at All."

Enter team Origami. If there was ever a crew that was a better fit to solve this unsolvable problem, we would like to meet them.

Origami founders Opher, Alon, and Ofer assembled a team with the highest credentials to break the back of this billion dollar problem...including a PhD in software engineering, deep advertising platform experience at Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Kagoor, not to mention some hard hitting Israeli intelligence. It doesn't hurt that they are backed by Accel partners, Icon Ventures and Lightspeed.

From the first sit down with Opher and the Origami team, it was clear they were on the right path. They knew instinctively how important it was to build a great product, company and category at the same time. Origami earned the hard yards by grinding out a killer product, getting the product/market fit right, building a stellar list of customers and high profile campaigns, and a strong company filled with fast moving people on a mission to fix this problem.

When the time came to set the strategic position for the product and company, you could feel the stress to get this right. We all knew there was something huge here. The mega category "martech" was getting a lot of attention because enterprise CMOs were about to surpass CIOs as the biggest tech budgets. With good reason too, as more than 40% of all advertising has moved online; hundreds of billions of dollars of spending chasing a new generation of people who spent most of their time on their smartphones, apps and the web.

As we spoke with the Origami founding team, especially Alon, there was a tangible dissatisfaction that the industry did not understand the core insight from Origami. They knew all the moths were flying fast to the BI or Marketing Intelligence flames. As Alon would emphatically state, "Another shitty spreadsheet, from a pile of shitty data will not help the CMO solve her most urgent problem! Her problem is knowing exactly what happened today! Not tomorrow. Not next week. And for certain, not at the end of the quarter when it's too late to make any adjustments to optimize the current spend in play."

That was it. All entrepreneurs have a market or technology insight. The Origami team had a powerful tech insight. What is the most important marketing element to measure that will tell a CMO exactly happened today? The answer is marketing signals. Marketing signals are defined as:

1. The actions audiences take in response to marketing activities (ad clicks, video views, website visits, post shares, etc.);
2. The thousands of metrics marketing platforms generate (average time on site, click-through rate, cost per engagement, etc.).

But why are marketing signals so hard to measure? Because it was technically challenging and in some cases impossible to harvest, organize, reconcile, and take action on the billions of daily signals from marketing platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Google, Bing, Instagram, LinkedIn; marketing execution systems like Sprinklr, Marin, DoubleClick, Admob, Adwords and more.

Digital marketing is the wild west. It's a highly fragmented, constantly changing and morphing world. New platforms such as Pinterest and Houzz grow from nothing to tens of millions of users in months. And if you are an enterprise who wants to advertise to home decorators - then you really need to know what is happening today on Houzz.

Origami was adamant that offering a CMO another spreadsheet or chart from a BI tool was like offering a person in a life raft, who is dying of thirst, a big glass of salt water. They knew the CMO needed answers on how to interpret and makes sense of what was happening today across all of these disparate systems in order to defeat the competition in that massive online battlefield.

Origami had moved far beyond simple connectors and built a whole harvesting architecture that captured and cleansed marketing signals from the digital universe. Signals from hundreds of millions of users who were liking, posting, sharing, commenting, pining and clicking. And not only that, the harversters were kind of living breathing machines in their own right - because the API's to these marketing platforms were changing on a daily basis.

Then Pow! Origami's positioning came flying out of the heads of the founders and into the actionable marketing and sales plans.

"The CMO's of Tomorrow Know What Happened Today."

Origami's version of "No Software" was born.

With these category insights and a powerful POV, the team at Origami went ballistic. They created the category taxonomy that hangs on hundreds of marketers walls today - the Marketing Signals Framework. They then evangelized Marketing Signal Measurement empowered CMO's and VP's of marketing analytics to answer the most important question in marketing - what happened today.

Origami then picked up the category design playbook and selected an event to launch this new category and their product offers at ANA Masters of Measurement in Miami Beach. Origami mobilized their entire company around this single strike and crushed it with a show stealing keynote, a booth with lines down the hall, a VIP event that was 2X over subscribed, and their PR Air war results set the high mark for explaining why Marketing Signals Measurement is the most important investment category for CMOs.

They also closed a Series C financing in the same timeframe as the event which funds their war chest to push all dimenions of their business, product, company, and category forward.

Check out some of Origami's great category design results:

http://www.marketingdive.com/news/can-marketers-use-data-to-answer-what-...

http://www.origamilogic.com/webinar-daily-measurement-lp

We salute team Origami!