Rob Hall, co-founder of Playground xyz, the attention-based advertising platform acquired by GumGum in 2021, has announced his return to AdTech with the launch of Parallel.
Launched in Sydney and London, Parallel allows brands to quantify and optimise resonance – the fit between a customer, an ad and the content they’re viewing – across live advertising campaigns.
Rob Hall, CEO of Parallel, said: “Today, impressions are checked for brand safety and brand suitability – but never for whether they’re right for the customer. That’s Customer Suitability: the missing piece, and the one Parallel set out to solve.
“Using the customer’s voice as a signal adds huge value to the millions of activation decisions brands make every day.
“Delivered via human-calibrated digital twins, we simulate and score the resonance between a customer, an ad and the content it runs against then push that into real-time activation.”
Parallel combines proprietary AI, large-scale data sets and digital twins – synthetic replicas of consumers, used elsewhere to test and predict outcomes across industries including healthcare, aviation and manufacturing – to bring the customer’s perspective directly into the bidstream. The tech is focused on video environments and platforms.
Parallel’s digital twins achieve 80.4 per cent accuracy when compared with real human responses. They can be used to answer millions of questions in seconds, allowing brands to simulate customer reactions to creative and content combinations at scale.
Hall describes the technology as “a virtual focus group that happens before every impression you buy”.
Like Playground xyz, Parallel is backed by Sydney-based venture capital firm Shearwater Capital, which has invested AU$4m in the new venture as part of a seed round.
Parallel launches with a six-strong team based in London and Sydney. In London, Hall is joined by Ben Dimond (UK managing director) and Billy Gittins (senior sales lead).