Q&A with Tempr.’s CEO and Co-founder, Cloé Dana
Nominated as one of Forbes 30 Under 30 is Tempr.’s CEO and Co-founder, Cloé Dana. Today, she shares her expertise in the UA world — from building companies to modern-day challenges to revolutionizing the way we optimize user acquisition. Get inspired by her takes on the future of UA, women in tech, and find out what Adikteev's partnership with Tempr. has to offer.
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Talk a little bit about your journey starting Tempr. What pushed you to start a UA automation company?
I started my first company in the UA world with 3 of my co-founders, who are the same at Tempr. It was an international mobile marketing agency called Dreamin. We began mostly with the clients in the US and a bit all over the world, I’d say.
After a couple of years, I was surprised to see that even some of our biggest clients didn’t have an automation system in place. If the UA managers were away for the weekend or on holidays and some campaigns were performing badly, nobody would notice it until Monday morning, to say the least. So this was the first concern and pain point I identified during the Dreamin journey.
Another point that really surprised me was the fact that some clients were spending a lot of money every month and didn’t have a data science team in place. However, they relied on data science to optimize their campaigns and make sure that they would allocate their budget in the best way. So technically, everything was on the UA manager’s expertise, which is still very good. They had great UA managers and sometimes they had internal BI and data science teams but it wasn’t necessarily connected to how they optimized their UA campaigns.These two points really bothered me and I got into an understanding with my co-founders that we will continue as a mobile marketing agency, but whenever we see a real pain point that an AdTech project can solve, we will invest in this product and launch a SaaS company.
So after a few years, I presented the Tempr. project.
What is Tempr. and what’s the added value of UA automation?
Tempr. is a prediction and automation technology that maximizes mobile marketers’ return on advertising spend. We are connected with APIs to the MMPs and marketing channels of our clients. We gather all of their data and push it into the Tempr. engine, which is the prediction algorithm we developed in-house. Based on all of this data and the historical data, the seasonality, and other inputs in our algorithm, we make predictions about how the campaigns are going to behave in the future.
Let’s say we look at the ROAS Day 7, for instance. We see that across your different marketing spends on Facebook, Google Ads, and Applovin, you can reallocate 10% from Facebook to Google Ads or from another marketing campaign to a different one to see a 20% extra return on your spend upon applying the new budget and bid recommendations from Tempr. That’s our primary function.
The second part of Tempr. is automation. The algorithm calculates thousands of scenarios and identifies the one that is the most profitable for the client in the future and in the present. You don’t have to go back to the platforms, like Google Ads and Facebook, for instance, to change the budget as you can change it directly from Tempr. and save time.
Therefore, the two added values of Tempr. are to maximize your returns and save time.
What is Tempr. going to be able to accomplish for its clients with the Adikteev partnership?
What instantly clicked from the word go was the fact that Adikteev wasn’t just a financial partner. Our partnership is important because we have very similar kinds of clients but at the same time, offer different products.
So the main synergy is supported by the fact that Adikteev offers a retargeting product to their clients, who can also benefit from projects like Tempr. to help them optimize and maximize their return on what they spent including their spend on Adikteev, for instance.
How do Adikteev and Tempr. work together?
At first, we identified the clients Adikteev can help us target. Our main area of concern was the US as we didn’t have any hold of the market while Adikteev is well established in the region. This was our first major point of linkage and was our short to a mid-term goal: to establish a client base in the US.
In the long run, we hope to work together and help our common clients from both sides.
What has your experience been like as a woman in tech?
It has mostly been a bit of a lonely experience so far. However, we are moving in the right direction and that's great news. Every year we can see more women going into tech. In the advertising world, more specifically mobile marketing, we’re not many. The experience is balanced. When you go to a trade show, you can definitely see that 80% of the people are men and it always feels a bit weird.
I personally think that having a role model or example to look up to is very important. It allows you to pursue your goals and also have a point of reference. It’s not that I lacked one but I wanted to set an example myself and put a message out to the world that “We’re not there yet. It’s not the same as being equal with guys but let’s go there and lead by example.” I’m sure that it’s possible.
Overall, for me, it has been more difficult during my previous experiences because Tempr. is not my first company. But when I wanted to raise funds, I’ve seen that there is a gender difference and it is very apparent. So, that was a bad way to acknowledge how it wasn’t equal for men and women.
But I always look at the brighter side of things and get involved in a lot of women's clubs and associations to show people out there that it is possible. That’s the most essential part. It is key to let every woman know that you can be not only a woman in tech but a co-founder in the tech industry. You can be anyone you want.
What’s the next big thing in UA? Where is it headed?
It can go in different directions. I believe (and I don’t say this because I co-founded Tempr.) that if the technologies like ours are massively adopted, it would help even smaller companies that don’t have the same budget as the bigger ones to still be big actors in the UA.
Now with the SKAdNetwork and the changes in Google, it favors the companies that have sufficient advertising budgets because if you have limited data on your campaigns and a limited budget you won’t be able to spend on more than two or three channels. And, if you don’t have a data science team, it will be even worse.
So, now it’s the best time for us to prove that if you have insufficient data, it’s even more important for you to take advantage of prediction, to use all of the limited data that you have to do the modeling and be profitable faster. It is imperative that you grow fast if you don’t have a big budget. That’s the first point.
The second point is that creatives are going to be more crucial in the coming years. It already plays a huge role but it’s going to be even bigger. The way how you handle creatives will make a difference, especially with fewer data points and the fact that you can’t run many tests. So, that’s the way to go - to reach people, engage with them, and make sure they select your product instead of another one.
I think it’s a good balance when you have a tool that helps you predict and automate in order to save time, and maximize your returns, while you will be focusing on the strategy and the creativity of your campaigns. It will ensure that you engage with the right people and that they click on your ads.
This is the safe combination to beat data privacy and be profitable in the future.