Eric Frankel is an innovative business leader with a proven track record in traditional media and emerging technologies. He is the CEO & Founder of AdGreetz, the industry’s leading video personalization tech platform disrupting the $628b advertising marketplace by empowering brands worldwide. Before AdGreetz, Frankel spent several decades at Warner Bros. as President of Warner Bros. Domestic Cable Distribution.
Frankel was born and raised in a family of four in the New York metropolitan area. As a young boy, he was always interested in business and finding new ways to make money. That led him to start working at an early age. From delivering newspapers to shovelling snow to working as a busboy in the restaurant, he developed his hustle mindset early in life, which has served him well to date.
However, his real entrepreneurship journey began when Frankel joined college and he began promoting concerts as his side hustle. His venture was a massive success, with his team organizing around 37 concerts in nine different facilities. Due to their imminent rise in the industry, they soon became the primary source of entertainment in the city of Syracuse, where his college was located. His organization consisted of over 150 people that he recruited over the period to organize top-notch events. Together the team did television commercials, hosted contests, promotions, and sold out every event consistently that instantly put the organization on the radar, making them a big hit!
When Frankel graduated from college, he had job offers lined up for him due to his prior success. One of the job offers he received was from Warner Brothers, the entertainment conglomerate, at a time when cable television was a relatively new business filled with ambiguity. The proposition, however, amused Frankel, who loved watching a good movie, “The idea that you could put a cassette in your VCR, and you could instantly watch a movie was genius. And there were all these new channels, rather than the six channels that I grew up watching. So I went to work there for 28 years, and I worked there straight till I became President.”
While working at Warner Brothers, Frankel created a long list of achievements. From advancements in new technologies such as Video On Demand (VOD) and High Definition (HD) to making numerous record-breaking sales and ground-breaking deals at Warner Bros, that helped him climb the ladder to reach the post of President in record time. While working at Warner Brothers, Frankel envisioned the disruption of the cable industry in the near future, moving from a medium that scheduled with a set menu to streaming any show that you want at any given point in time. Frankel recalled, “And so I spent 12 years at Warner Brothers convincing the television industry to embrace that. And for 12 years, every chairman of every cable satellite and internet company said that’s the stupidest idea they’ve ever heard.”
Soon the industry was transformed overnight, and there was a significant shift to streaming giants such as Netflix and Hulu. Frankel decided it was the time to call quits.
“I thought to myself, what do I want to do next? One day I came up with an idea. I saw a need in the marketplace. And after all those years and success. I decided to become an entrepreneur,” said Frankel
He saw a gap in the way brands were conversing with their customers. Frankel went on to explain, “When I was dropping off my son at college, the largest retailer in the US was telling me that diapers were on sale. He is an 18-year old and doesn’t need diapers. Unfortunately, I wasn’t old enough either. And I decided that most brands never welcomed me in a meaningful way.” He realized there was an enormous gap in advertising; brands were not customizing their advertisements based on their customer’s likes and preferences, leading to ineffective marketing with huge costs.
Thus Frankel embarked on his journey and founded the company, AdGreetz to cater to this cause. They started by creating a platform called Ad Chef that comes up with a strategy. A team of highly-skilled, creative executives then take a generic ad given by Ad Chef and turn it into a personalized version based on that strategy that might appeal to the customer based on the city, clothing, stores near them, and the opportunity to click and buy. The memo is then created and sent to the client. Once the client signs off, AdGreetz fully automates the whole process by adding 100 or 1000 different cities, towns or villages.
Frankel continued, “And then we have what we call an API integration. We have integrated with Facebook, Google, Snapchat, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Tiktok. These messages automatically get pushed out into those platforms that are built to know who you are, the city you’re in and other information about you and display the messages that are relevant to each individual customer. And then as these messages play, over time, we are able to see which ones are working the best.”
Recently they did an ad for OLED, the latest range of televisions by the brand LG in India. The team devised creatives to appeal to several groups based on their likes and preferences. To cater to families, they displayed an ad that showed a family sitting on a couch watching family-oriented movies together. However, another set of creatives was displayed with people playing video games with high-definition quality to appeal to a person who likes video games. Similarly, each category had a different set of creatives that would be shown to them based on their interests. By doing this, they increased their clicks on the ad by 11 times. Additionally, they also reduced their cost per click by 89%.
However, the pandemic has significantly changed the marketing game yet again. Frankel says, “Before, brands didn’t care what message they were displaying to their customers. They felt that customers would come to their store or their website regardless. But now they have realised that they need to build a deep relationship with their customers.”
This had led to some brands reeling in considerable profits while others were going bankrupt. Frankel recalled a hamburger chain whose business went up by 25% since they pivoted quickly and changed strategies to keep the customer as their primary focus. They oriented themselves towards online ordering, delivery, curbside pickup and made it easy for consumers to buy their product with minimum risk of the deadly virus. The virus has disrupted marketing and has forced marketers and entrepreneurs to discover new avenues to connect with their customers and keep them at the centre.
In conclusion, talking about the future of marketing, Frankel says, “It is improving customer journey and experience. The pandemic has already made brands realize that they need to communicate more effectively and less than one size fits all. And we are definitely heading in that direction.”
