Hear from CIOs, CTOs, and other C-level and senior execs on data and AI strategies at the Future of Work Summit this January 12, 2022. Learn more
Anyword, an AI-powered platform for fine-tuning marketing copy, today announced that it raised $21 million in a financing round led by Innovation Endeavors with participation from Lead Capital and Gandyr Ventures. CEO Yaniv Makover says that the proceeds, which bring the company’s total raised to $30 million, will be used to bolster hiring, build out Anyword’s technology, and onboarding customers to the platform.
Anyword’s growth comes as marketers increasingly express a willingness to embrace AI-driven creation tools. According to a survey by Phrasee, an Anyword rival, 63% of marketers surveyed would consider investing in AI to generate and optimize ad copy. Statista reports that 87% of current AI adopters are already using — or considering using — AI for sales forecasting and for improving their email marketing. And 61% of marketers say that AI is the most important aspect of their larger data strategy.
“The company was originally founded as Keywee, a platform used by publishers such as the New York Times, NBC, and CNN to analyze each article they wrote and find audiences based on the keywords in these articles,” Makover told VentureBeat via email. “Writing has pretty much stayed the same process in the last few hundred years. Computers and word processing helped, but they didn’t materially change how we write to convey a message or a narrative, specifically for an intended audience and with a goal in mind. In marketing and sales, we are writing for someone and usually with a measurable objective. Incorporating data about which words, concepts, and styles work better for a specific audience and industry was our goal [when we pivoted].”
Optimizing copy with AI
Anyword claims to have trained a copy-generating model on two billion data points from A/B testing messages across industries, channels, and marketing objectives. Leveraging it, Anyword customers can create copy — including headlines, subheaders, email subject lines, text messages, descriptions, and captions — while understanding how different demographics might react to variations of the same copy. The platform’s tools can connect ad accounts and incorporate keywords and promotions (e.g., “new arrivals” and “free shipping”), tailoring copy to a specific length. Beyond this, they can optimize on-site copy to display specific messages to specific audiences.
“Train our AI copywriting tool to write copy in your brand voice, similar to your competitors, or similar to your top performing live ads,” Anyword explains on its website.
With Anyword, marketers plug in a URL, summary, or product description to generate copy. After choosing a format and tone, Anyword creates several versions of the copy, scored and sorted by predicted quality. From there, Anyword can rewrite and show comparisons between the variations, improving over time over existing ads.
“Predicting how well a text variation will do for a goal and audience necessitates a special dataset. First, you need to know how a text variation did historically for a given audience. You need to have a breadth of data covering many styles and topics,” Makover said. “Our datasets of text variations and their respective performance metrics consist of millions of variations [to improve, for example,] conversion rates for … websites, emails, ads, social posts, and blog posts.”
Competition
Spurred by digital transformations that accelerated during the pandemic, a larger share of companies are expected to adopt AI technologies that automatically suggest and tailor marketing and sales materials. According to the Phrasee survey, 65% of marketers trust that AI can generate desirable brand language, and 82% believe that their organization would benefit from data that provides insights into how consumers respond to that language.
Fifty-employee, Tel Aviv- and New York-based Anyword competes with Phrasee, which partnered with Walgreens early in the pandemic to create a targeted email campaign about COVID-19 vaccine availability. Other competitors include Instoried, CopyAI, Copysmith, Writesonic, and New York City-based Persado AI. While new startups in the “AI in marketing tech” segment arise with some frequency, Anyword is betting that its technology will enable it to stand out in a market that could be worth $40.09 billion by 2025.
“We’ve been growing 35% month-over-month on average since launching Anyword in March,” Makover said. “Since the end of Q1 2021, we have acquired 1,200 customers. Our customers range from small businesses looking for better performance from their marketing content and ecommerce offerings to publishers who have significant volumes to agencies and enterprises looking for deeper integrations with their products and services.”
VentureBeat
- up-to-date information on the subjects of interest to you
- our newsletters
- gated thought-leader content and discounted access to our prized events, such as Transform 2021: Learn More
- networking features, and more
Source: Read Full Article