RICH metrics help you fail forward - Gustav von Sydow from Burt

Gustav von Sydow founded Burt which has already produced Copybox, a tool that can be described as photoshop for copywriters and now they've launched RICH, or "metrics that matter". Rich can run on any ad network or ad server, it's a third party tool that produces faster and better metrics, allowing you to watch in realtime how your online campaign is coming along.

DB:If Rich was an appendix - what body part is it?

von Sydow: If you by this mean an organ, I would say the brain. Not so much that Rich is clever on it's own (although it's not entirely stupid), but since it provides a memory of what has happened and let future actions be.

How does Rich work, technically?

Agencies add a piece tracking code to the ads or widgets they want to track. It takes a couple of seconds - in Flash it's a simple drag and drop. When the campaign goes live the ads report information to our servers, which we analyze and present to user in an easy-to-understand web application.

"Fail forward" - a clever way of condensing learn from your mistakes, is this what Rich helps you do? Move on from mistakes faster?

It's really not about the failures, you can learn a lot from success too. The key concept is *learning*. Rich enables a quicker feedback loop, where all people involved in a campaign - from planners to designers - to better understand how online media works and consumers respond to their work.

You were a planner, and Rich is tailored to be used by planners and creatives rather than suits who are quite adapt at dealing with digits and graphs already. Now that it exists, it's such an obvious hole in the market you've filled here - why didn't people think of this before? What
made you do it?

Most companies in our space probably don't share our motivation. For instance, we've experienced the challenges of integrating metrics and continuous learning into the creative process. We had the itch, and scratched it. If you look at it from a purely technological perspective, a lot of what we are doing have been done before, both in and out of advertising. It has also to be proven to be very successful in driving effect.

However, what we bring to the table is making advertising technology more accessible to a broader set of audience. I think the key insight driving us is that creatives are super interested in both advertising technology and metrics, but in order for them to use it on a daily basis we need to make it easier to use and understand.