\u201cWe have one piece of the puzzle people are looking for in the area of personalization,\u201d Diana Lee told me.<\/p>\n
Lee is the founder and CEO of Constellation, among other things the tenth fastest-growing women-owned private company, according to Inc 500. In simple terms, Constellation is an agency with a creative platform that makes content scaleable. But simple terms aren\u2019t enough. Constellation\u2019s piece of the puzzle includes aggregating data from an immense range of sources, using it to train industry-specific LLMs (or chatbots).<\/p>\n
This means, first, that consumers don\u2019t have to visit countless websites for product information, in effect aggregating it for themselves. And second, personalized messaging becomes personalized at scale.<\/p>\n
One use case is the automotive industry where countless dealers nationwide are trying to reach potential customers with relevant messages.<\/p>\n
Data-based marketing for auto<\/h2>\n
In order to understand Constellation\u2019s value to the automotive industry, we spoke with Joe Kyriakoza, VP and general manager at Polk from S&P Global Mobility. Polk Automotive Solutions has been tracking automotive data for over a century. Today it is part of S&P Global Mobility, a division of S&P Global which in turn describes itself as an \u201cessential intelligence\u201d business. <\/p>\n
\u201cS&P Global Mobility is a data-rich environment of automotive information and analytics from every part of the automotive life cycle, whether it\u2019s the manufacturer\u2019s planning for their next vehicle launch or understanding how many vehicles they\u2019re going to sell over the next five years.\u201d <\/p>\n
Then there are the marketing and sales assets. \u201cWhen a vehicle is ready to launch, we\u2019re helping the manufacturers and dealers market those vehicles, understand their target audience based on the data we have and make smarter, educated marketing decisions.\u201d<\/p>\n
S&P Global Mobility has a database of 130 million marketing-permissible households. \u201cWe\u2019re able to validate automotive intelligence on top of that through relationships we have with the state DMVs as well as the OEMs themselves who send us their sales data on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. S&P Global and Polk know very well what my buying patterns are.\u201d<\/p>\n
The insights, which extend to almost everyone who has bought a car in the U.S., include their propensity to buy, their brand and price-point preferences and whether they are likely to pick a used car rather than a new one, whether they are likely to lease, finance or pay with cash. \u201cWe have all that data in a giant mixing bowl. We are a central source for that data for the OEMs across the U.S.\u201d<\/p>\n
The OEMs are part of the S&P\/Polk customer base, but they also sell data solutions to the major dealer groups like AutoNation and CarMax as well as to smaller dealers through ad agencies that represent numerous small dealers. The data is integrated into the platforms that the customers are using to transact media, from Facebook to LiveRamp and The Trade Desk.<\/p>\n
Why aren\u2019t the big automotive manufacturers developing this vital audience data themselves? \u201cI think they\u2019re starting to pull it together now,\u201d said Kyriakoza. \u201cOver the last five years we\u2019ve seen a migration from basic CRM marketing to customer data platform relationships that allow them to unify their data in one repository and then do their own segmentation. What we help them do is understand whether the data is clean \u2014 is that person still the owner of the vehicle, is there a new owner, did they change addresses? We\u2019ll work with the CDP provider to install our data on top of theirs. We then do an enrichment play where we bring a whole bunch of other attributes to that database.\u201d<\/p>\n
Constellation\u2019s piece of the puzzle<\/h2>\n
\u201cS&P has these personalized audiences,\u201d said Lee. \u201cIt could be people who are in market to buy a Volkswagen right now. That\u2019s one piece of the puzzle. Our piece would be the content that\u2019s generated, that\u2019s localized and specific. The other piece would be our data. For auto, that\u2019s incentive data, the vehicle data, social listening data and marketing insights data. You need to know who your audience is before you start doing digital marketing.\u201d<\/p>\n
Constellation also uses this data, in combination with the data customers bring to the mix, and open data sources (blogs, Reddit, Wikipedia and so on) to train large language models. \u201cWhat we believe at Constellation,\u201d said Lee, \u201cis that everybody will soon start building their own large language models; they will build their own chatbots. What we\u2019re doing is teaming up with clients to help build the infrastructure of their own LLMs and chatbots.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ultimately, Lee believes traditional website interactions with brands will be a thing of the past as conversational chatbots become able to deliver answers to a full range of questions. \u201cNone of the existing chatbots are able to answer industry-specific questions,\u201d she continued. \u201cWhich VIN numbers of Honda Civics are there within five states and where can I find them? It won\u2019t be able to answer that industry-specific question. If we teamed up with an OEM (I\u2019m using Honda as an example), we would be able to build that chatbot and they would own that conversation.\u201d<\/p>\n
In automotive alone, Constellation has the data for all 17,500 U.S. franchisees. \u201cWho has the BMW X5? I know every dealer that has it; I don\u2019t have to go to 20 different websites, I don\u2019t have to go to Carvana or CarMax; I\u2019m able to get the information for BMW, but also find the information for Audi, competitively, in the same chatbot. That\u2019s what we want for the future.\u201d<\/p>\n
The key to this is that Constellation is not training an LLM on one manufacturer\u2019s data. BMW could do that for itself. But how come BMW data can exist in the same mix as Audi or Mercedes Benz data \u2014 they\u2019re competitors, right? \u201cFrom a national perspective I could never do that; I would have to service one and sign an NDA. When you are working local and it\u2019s dealer-specific, that data no longer belongs just to the OEMs, it belongs to each and every franchise and that\u2019s when you can aggregate that information and begin to use it.\u201d The franchises are happy to share, because it puts their inventory in front of consumers\u2019 eyes.<\/p>\n
Data-based dynamic creative for auto<\/h2>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve been working with Constellation for the better part of a year on some test and learn programs. We have an official relationship now where we are providing our audience intelligence to their systems,\u201d Kyriakoza explained. \u201cIt\u2019s helping them target the right audience on behalf of their dealer customers; that\u2019s table stakes. The second piece, which we haven\u2019t seen anyone else able to deliver on, is this idea of dynamic creative.\u201d<\/p>\n
S&P data is now infused into Constellation\u2019s dynamic creative capabilities. One hundred different Toyota dealers, said Kyriakoza, are going to have different messages, names locations and themes. \u201cThat\u2019s cumbersome. Constellation has built AI technology that allows them to render those creatives based on a bunch of inputs they have in the system. Based on our data, knowing a person is already a Toyota owner, that might cause a change in the message.\u201d<\/p>\n
Constellation compensates S&P for the data and monetizes the audience insights and dynamic creative it can provide to whoever is selling cars. S&P supplies data to other agencies, of course, but with Constellation \u201cit\u2019s next level with the creative piece,\u201d said Kyriakoza, especially in a market of 17,500 franchises where content can become just a commodity.<\/p>\n
But this has use cases in addition to automotive. Constellation offers a similar model to the pharma industry. Are there other use cases? \u201cInsurance found us last year, not an industry we were even looking for. We want to represent anybody that has difficulty in the regulated space. It could be real estate, auto, insurance, pharma. life sciences, medical health insurance \u2014 they all struggle with the same issues.\u201d<\/p>\n
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