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Over the last few months, the Funnel team has shared some very exciting news. First, they released a completely new look, and shortly after, announced the acquisition of marketing measurement vendor Adtriba. This is a move that is set to strengthen Funnel’s position in the global marketing intelligence market, leveraging Adtriba’s AI-powered measurement technology to offer more precise and comprehensive marketing insights.
We sat down with CEO Fredrik Skantze, and VP Brand & Communication Carl Ronander, to discuss these latest moves, and where the company is heading next.
From red to green – tell us about the new brand!
It’s a new look for Funnel, but the visual identity is only the tip of the iceberg! Behind it is an updated strategic direction for our brand, which we have developed for almost a year. As many SaaS companies, we used to communicate only the functional product aspects and benefits. To build a truly distinctive and iconic brand you need to bring out more of the emotional benefits and associations you want to position on. Through extensive customer research and internal workshops we found a new direction and positioning that we believe really resonates with our current customer base and allows us to capture the interest of a wider target audience for growth. With our updated brand strategy and identity we can build brand equity through a brand that is distinctive and differentiated and thus hard for your competition to mimic.
What were the thoughts behind the rebranding? Why was now the time to do it?
Funnel has grown at great speed and as a company we were entering a new phase with the acquisition of Adtriba. Going from a Data Hub, which remains the core of Funnel, to a Marketing Intelligence Platform with a broader offering we felt we needed a bigger brand and clearly stand out as the category defining brand that we are.
How do you see the brand helping you stand out from the competition?
Building a strong brand is all about becoming more distinctive and memorable. You achieve that by having a clearly identified position, differentiating relative to your competition and communicating consistently over time. As an example, if we return to your initial remark that Funnel is now green; in our design audit, one of the things that stood out was that red was an overrepresented brand colour in the category. Even one of our main competitors has a red colour very similar to (possibly inspired by) Funnel’s. Becoming green helps people recognise and remember which brand is Funnel and also seems more on-point when talking about the positive impact data can have on your marketing.
Standing out is about having great discipline to consistently codify your communication with your brand, but also to leverage creativity. The most costly and dangerous thing for a brand is only trying to fit a category mould. If everyone looks and talks the same way you are not helping prospects in making a decision and we know from research that basically every buying process (both in B2B and B2C) starts with people's perception of your brand.
Is there anything you’re particularly proud of achieving with the new look?
We were really strict about developing a design system that is based on a few hard working assets. That is how you create something recognisable and again distinctive. I have developed a fair bit of brand identities in my day, and I don’t think I have ever been able to create such a rich expression from “just” working with the simple idea of a circle and a square. I am also very proud that we dared to push the identity as far as we have. I can tell you that it was not a given, but when everything fell into place we knew that we could not go back to our past look. It is not your standard brand identity, but then Funnel is not your average company.
Let’s dive into the acquisition. What was the strategic rationale behind it and how does it align with the company’s long-term goals?
We see that advertising, and marketing, is becoming increasingly complex, and challenging. New privacy and antitrust regulations, technology changes, and declining effectiveness numbers have created somewhat of a perfect storm for marketers. Adding to this the marketing budget is still very substantial, and that ad prices are going up, there’s a real need among marketers to get a much better handle on what campaigns and channels actually bring incremental revenue, and to do it in a way that’s mindful of privacy. These are challenges we have always helped our customers solve, but we saw that the technology, and the market, is now mature enough to take the next step and include universal marketing measurement technology right inside of the Funnel platform. This technology allows marketers to understand the true contribution of each marketing channel, even for channels that are difficult or impossible to measure through traditional means. Thanks to the machine learning models we use, it will also give very hands-on advice on how to optimise your marketing budget to spend just the right amount in each channel. Finally, it allows marketing leaders to test out different scenarios, so it becomes a fantastic tool not just to report on your marketing activities, but actually improve outcomes and build strategy.
It also broadens the appeal of the Funnel platform, and puts us in a space – attribution – that was valued at $3.1 billion in 2021 and projected to reach $12.9 billion by 2031.
It also brings some very sophisticated AI capabilities and know-how, which will be incredibly important right now and in the future.
How did this acquisition come about?
When considering how to best offer this to our customers, we had three objectives: The technology needs to be class-leading the same way Funnel is class-leading as a data hub, it needs to be proven with customers, and it needs to integrate deeply with the Funnel Data Hub. The answer to those three questions turned out to be acquiring a Hamburg-based company we had partnered with for several years, Adtriba. Even if we are only two months in as a combined company, we can say that the demand has surpassed our expectations, so clearly this value proposition resonates with customers.
What value do you expect to deliver to customers thanks to this, and how does that set you apart from your main competitors?
Funnel is unique in the combination of our robust Data Hub with the sophistication of our new AI-driven measurement capabilities. We hear from industry analysts that our take is different than many others’ – and this is also what has proven to be the single largest differentiator with the 40 or so customers that use the combined solution today. What it basically means is that we take away the largest obstacles companies face trying to properly measure their marketing, which is collecting, cleaning, and organizing their data before they can apply the measurement algorithms. We also offer an industry-leading methodology for calculating the true contribution of channels and campaigns, where we use triangulation to combine marketing mix modelling, multi-touch attribution, and incrementally testing in a cohesive AI model. This means that marketers get more accurate and timely data – updated every day – instead of the month-long lead times they previously had to endure.
Can we expect any new products or services as a result of this acquisition?
With the announcement, we also announced our first combined product, Funnel Measurement. This is an add-on module in the Funnel Marketing Intelligence platform, fully integrated with the Funnel Data Hub. The reason we were able to pull this off so quickly was of course our existing partnership and the flexibility of both products, alongside some great work by our product team.
We also have a very interesting roadmap with several new capabilities on the way, including self-service model tuning and server-side tracking, which we think will further set us apart and deliver even more value to customers and partners.
Can you talk about the talent aspect of adding the Adtriba team to Funnel? Are you bringing in any key roles as a result of the acquisition?
With the acquisition we have a world-class team of measurement experts. János Moldvay, who is the founder and CEO of Adtriba, will take the position as VP Measurement at Funnel. The product teams in Germany and Sweden are already working very collaboratively together, and we will make further hires in both locations.
Is there an aspect of internationalisation and getting a market advantage through buying local champions?
Adtriba for sure has a strong position in the DACH region, but most important is to offer our unique Marketing Intelligence solution to Funnels global market and customer base. Interestingly, Adtriba is a very internationally diverse company, so both the fit was perfect, both in terms of the teams and the kinds of customers we have.Generally, we have put a lot of focus on internationalisation and having a globally competitive product. Localisation is important too though, and that has been one of the drivers behind our successful Solution Partner program. This means that we don’t necessarily have to acquire a company to find a local champion – we already have them with our great partnerships.
What are your thoughts on future acquisitions?
Our priority is to offer the best Marketing Intelligence solution possible to marketers through innovative and truly useful features. If the best path to achieving this is through acquisition we will do it, but it is not a growth tactic. Part of the value of Funnel Marketing Intelligence is also that it is a truly unified platform, so we need to be absolutely certain that we have a match both in terms of tech and people – just like what we found with Adtriba. At the end of the day, our focus is to build a category defining product and profitable business, and central to that is the value we provide to our customers and partners. With that said, we are always open to looking at potential acquisitions if there is a good fit with our category and data hub platform.
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