Knorex was founded with one goal: to simplify digital marketing to accelerate business growth — Justin Choo, Ph.D., Founder & CEO

“Our flagship product, Knorex XPO, is a self-service enterprise-grade cloud platform that encompasses a comprehensive suite of advertising management and execution applications to enable marketers to automate and scale their advertising operations and processes.”

 Founded in 2009 with dual headquarters in California and Singapore, Knorex is a B2B technology company that offers programmatic advertising products and solutions to marketers across diverse verticals, including automotive, finance, healthcare, hospitality and travel, retail, real estate, and others. The company’s flagship cloud platform, Knorex XPO, is an AI-driven advertising management and execution (AMX) platform that enables marketers to connect in real-time with their desired audience worldwide through the industry’s widest and deepest connectivity to leading digital ad channels, including native platforms such as social media and search, and online ad channels such as connected TVs/OTTs, video, audio, display, native, and email, in one place. With its unique blend of AI-powered features and deep integration capabilities, XPO offers unparalleled automation to streamline highly complex workflows, intelligent optimization and personalization across leading digital ad channels. Further, XPO centralizes execution across various leading platforms to consolidate fragmented data to create a singular source of truth for holistic insights and rapid decisioning. Knorex operates in the US, and Asia.

The Silicon Review reached out to Justin Choo, Ph.D., Founder, and CEO of Knorex, and here’s what he had to say.

Interview Highlights

Q. What was the motivation behind starting Knorex?

Knorex was founded with the mission to simplify the increasingly complex world of digital marketing to help businesses navigate and accelerate their growth. During our formative years, we observed that digital marketing was fast becoming an integral growth driver for many businesses – “Digital marketing is the new sales”. Having sufficient reach is key for marketers to connect with as many desired audiences as possible to effectively promote their products and services. But that means marketers will have to operate as many online advertising channels as practically possible to strategically reach their desired audience at the right time. Operating the corresponding software platforms to manage two or more of these leading ad channels, which are siloed and disparate, is highly complex, costly, manual, and requires specialist expertise, thus severely limiting many small to midsize businesses from partaking in this growth engine. Meanwhile, more media and advertising channels continue to proliferate, propelled by the pandemic, providing more choices for advertising and engagement, but also resulted in a highly fragmented and complex environment.

Q. Can you explain about your services in brief?

Our flagship product, Knorex XPOsm, is a self-service enterprise-grade cloud platform that encompasses a comprehensive suite of advertising management and execution (AMX) applications that we design and develop from the ground up specifically for marketers. Our AMX platform empowers marketers to orchestrate omni-channel advertising, and streamline and automate manual processes, ultimately enhancing advertising efficiency and performance. Driven by our proprietary AI/ML technology, XPO enables intelligent automation and scaling, allowing marketers to seamlessly manage and control core mission-critical online advertising processes from a centralized user interface, allowing marketers to effortlessly set up advertising campaigns and advertise across search, social media, apps, websites, desktop, mobile, smart TVs or connected televisions, streaming devices, and digital billboards. Our XPO platform revolutionizes digital advertising execution and management by offering marketers an integrated solution for omni-channel orchestration. It seamlessly consolidates the key functions of planning, creation, measurement, monitoring, management, and optimization of advertisements across the world’s leading advertising channels into a singular, unified platform. This eliminates the need for marketers to grapple with multiple siloed platforms, creating XPO as a comprehensive system of record.

Q. How do you maintain the balance of exclusivity and attainability of goals for the brands through your strategies?

Data privacy and the proper segregation are among the key priorities in the design of XPO. From the outset, we have consciously built XPO such separation in mind. Our customers, which are ad agencies, serve various clients from different industry verticals. At times, they could overlap or have competing clients. Hence, having the ability to segregate while still providing differentiated services is important. In XPO, we equip our customers with various user and account management control features and tools, down to our machine learning algorithms and models, which are tailored and optimized to and based on the respective account. Our customers are able to create a unique, individual ad account for each advertising client. Using our system’s default machine-learning base model, our AI engine KAIROS will ingest the data and signals belonging to each account to create a unique individual model for each account, thus maintaining exclusivity for each advertising account that is fine-tuned for each account and performing distinctively for that account based on that account’s KPI. This strategy has allowed us to address the concerns of our customers.

Q. A well-strategized marketing strategy will help the company build trust with consumers, potential clients, and customers. How do you create a roadmap or campaign that will meet the clients’ demands?

Trust is a cornerstone of our business. We have been extremely deliberate in the way we do business, in terms of transparency in our pricing, in our communication, and sharing in-depth documentation and details about our platform, which we published freely on the Internet. We value and take seriously the inputs from each of our customers, as we see them truly as business partners, and their inputs help to formulate and evolve our development roadmap through an agile methodology. This strategy has helped us to iterate our platform quickly while staying close to actual demand and requests from customers, creating a natural product-market fit.

Q. What is the role played by modern technologies in branding, and how do you leverage them to achieve marketing goals?

Omni-channel advertising, which caters to both online and offline advertising, is fast becoming an important requirement for advertisers looking to achieve the proverbial “right moment with the right message to the right person.” But going omni-channel is extremely challenging, as the current industry solution for many marketers is to cope with managing as many software platforms as practically possible to achieve the widest reach while attempting to contain the high costs. With our solution, Knorex XPO, which is built from the ground up with multi-channel in mind, we provide a seamlessly integrated cloud platform that enables marketers to gain access to real-time actionable insights and execute full-funnel, omni-channel optimizations effortlessly by consolidating data in real-time into a single source of truth, thereby enhancing advertising performance.

Q. Tell us about your content development. What are the factors that will contribute to the engagement level?

As digital marketing continues to evolve rapidly, it is important for marketers to keep abreast of the latest developments. But there are just so many new innovations and changes happening in our industry. For us, we have invested heavily into documentation and creating awareness of key topics, especially those that can have a heavy impact on our customers. We provide in-depth whitepapers and blog articles about such topics, while continue to enrich our help center articles to provide information on how certain features and tools in the Knorex XPO platform can provide a viable solution to these challenges. We see creating awareness and education as a critical part of what we do in our business.

Q. How do you bridge the gap between offline and online marketing services?

Our business is a B2B business, and in our case, we are specifically targeting ad agencies. Thus, developing a strategy that caters to both offline and online is critical for our outreach and marketing in creating awareness for our prospects. Besides publishing extensive information on our blog and help center, we actively participate in many trade shows and events to meet with partners, prospects, and existing customers. Such avenues provide our team with the opportunity to engage with them and gain valuable insights and feedback while creating awareness of our brand and solutions.

Q. Do you have any new services ready to be launched?

In Q4 2023, we launched support for digital-out-of-home (DOOH), completing our offering in the “programmatic” advertising channel. For first half of 2024, we are ready to launch a couple of exciting solutions, starting with Amazon Ads integration into XPO, further expanding the coverage of advertising channels. We are launching a beta version of our customer data platform (CDP) called Knorex Pulse, which will provide the opportunity for our customers to centralize their data and interaction signals into one source, while enabling them to activate campaigns that can exploit such signals in real-time across multiple channels. We have also rolled out a few major improvements and breakthroughs in terms of our AI/ML capabilities in XPO, further boosting our automation and scaling capability for our customers. The early results have been promising when we deployed them in live campaigns and ad accounts.

Q. What does the future hold for your company and its customers? Are exciting things on the way?

We believe in sustainable growth and long-term development. Our company has been growing steadily with our customers over the years through our consistent introduction of innovations while we improve our awesome client servicing and support. We continue to invest heavily in R&D to introduce new products and solutions based on the feedbacks from our customers, and to equip our customers with unique selling points for their clients. We want our customers to look and be the best, while we continue to do our best to support them and accelerate their business growth. Every day, our team is super excited about having the opportunity to work with our forward-looking customers while tackling challenges together in this rapidly evolving advertising space.

“Omni-channel advertising is fast becoming a must for advertisers looking to achieve the proverbial “right moment with the right message to the right person”.” 

“With our solution, Knorex XPO, which is built from the ground up with omni-channel in mind, we provide a seamlessly integrated cloud platform that enables marketers to gain access to real-time actionable insights and execute omni-channel optimizations effortlessly by consolidating data in real-time into a single source of truth to drive advertising performance.”