Welcome Attain’s Ask An Expert series! We’ll be talking to experts who are innovating in the marketing and advertising space, starting with our stellar team at Attain. This week we’ll be hearing from Clarence Kam who joined Attain this past August to oversee both our B2C and B2B product teams.
How did you begin working in this industry, and what led you to Attain?
I started my career in strategy consulting and after a few months, I realized I wanted to have more ownership which led me to a career with startups.
What led me to Attain was the ability to have a positive impact on people’s lives as well as the opportunity given the current market dynamics. Our consumer apps provide critical financial tools and services as an equitable exchange for data. My ad tech tenure has had a heavy focus on data, and I recognized Attain is uniquely positioned to address the challenges in consumer privacy as well as the rising opportunity in retail and commerce media. Understanding advertising’s effect on actual business outcomes using first-party permissioned purchase data is a gold mine.
What are your primary responsibilities?
My primary responsibility is to lead product strategy and guide the product management team to build world-class products for both consumers and marketers. Our mobile apps, Klover and Frisbee, provide financial services and purchase rewards to millions of Americans. Big picture, our data is sourced from a panel of 6 million permission-based users, accounting for daily sales activity that surpasses half a billion dollars on our platform.
Meanwhile, our suite of marketing products allows business users to target, measure and derive consumer insights using the permissioned data sourced from the apps. It’s my responsibility to ensure our products meet the needs of our customers while simultaneously aligning with the company’s overall business goals.
When thinking about Attain’s product roadmap, what excites you most?
This is like asking parents who their favorite child is! We have a lot of exciting initiatives in development, so I’ll share about one that is gaining fast traction in the market: we help advertisers measure the effectiveness of their advertising based on whether customers purchased a product after seeing their ad. We are working with many top-tier partners to bring this offering deeper into the market.
You’ve been at Attain for a few months now. What’s the biggest challenge in front of you?
Attain is disrupting the industry on multiple fronts, especially in the measurement arena. For example, some legacy measurement solutions take months to deliver results because they rely on self-reported survey panels that consumers receive in the mail; imagine trying to recall what you purchased three months ago on a grocery trip. Attain’s solutions are powered by real-time purchase data from actual transactions. We’re not only tasked with building first-to-market products but also communicating the value of the new approach and getting buy-in from an entire industry. Even when the new approach is objectively better, it takes time for the market to understand and shift how they are used to executing.
How do you think AI will change our industry?
AI is already being used to optimize campaign results, and it will continue to get more sophisticated over time. Additional applications that we are currently exploring include interpreting reports and metrics from campaigns to generate actionable insights.
Where do you hope to see Attain a year from now?
In a year, I want to see Attain providing even more value to our mobile app users to keep them engaged and grow our data footprint. This means making improvements to our existing apps and potentially building new apps. With the resulting data, I expect we’ll bring even more use cases to life for our advertising partners, across measurement, insights, and activation. Ultimately, our main goal is to make it simple for marketers to understand the true performance of their campaigns. This will set us up to continue expansion into new markets and territories.
