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Hotmob: Enabling more impactful marketing campaigns with Vertex AI

Google Cloud Results
  • Enhances marketing teams' productivity by 33%

  • Reduces marketers' admin workloads by 50% with Vertex AI

  • Simplifies data report generation with Looker Studio

  • Supports high query performance for quick complex analyses with BigQuery

Leveraging the AI and data analytics capabilities of Google Cloud, Hotmob is able to enhance productivity and digital presence of its marketer customers through automated content generation while supporting efficient data-driven decision-making.

We wanted to provide a generative AI tool that is able to significantly enhance marketers' productivity and performance by generating precise and relevant marketing content. Vertex AI stood out due to its high efficiency and accuracy in content generation, as well as its robust customization capabilities.

Karen Leung

Chief Business Officer, Hotmob

The digital marketing industry has gone through revolutionary changes as new technologies like big data and artificial intelligence (AI) take centerstage. Founded in 2007, Hotmob has been closely following the latest tech trends to provide leading digital marketing solutions.

As a data-centric media company, Hotmob offers a wide range of marketing services, including data enrichment, custom audience creation, digital campaign consultation, media placement, and monitoring. It also leverages the industry data that it gathers over the years to build AI models for its enterprise customers to enhance operational efficiency.

The company is not new to Google Cloud, having been customers for more than a decade. However, in early 2024, Hotmob decided to step up its AI application and develop Caterpillar AI, a marketing generative AI tool that allows users to generate text or image for their marketing campaigns by a few clicks and simple prompts.

Since Hotmob's customers come from different industries and run campaigns on various platforms, Caterpillar AI needs to understand and meet diverse marketing requests. After reviewing several offerings, the company chose to use Vertex AI with Gemini 1.5 Pro on Google Cloud to build Caterpillar AI.

"We wanted to provide a generative AI tool that is able to significantly enhance marketers' productivity and performance by generating precise and relevant marketing content," explains Karen Leung, Chief Business Officer at Hotmob. "Vertex AI stood out due to its high efficiency and accuracy in content generation, as well as its robust customization capabilities."

Enabling time-efficient, impactful marketing campaigns across industries

In April 2024, Hotmob launched Caterpillar AI, powered by Vertex AI. With Caterpillar AI, marketers can easily and quickly create text and images adapted to pre-defined audience persona, language tone, style, and distribution channel. Chow says that the easy adaptation is only possible thanks to the excellent content generation flexibility of the Gemini models in Vertex AI. During Hotmob's comparison test that looked at various generative AI applications, only Gemini could correctly follow different brands' content guidelines like wording and brand name inclusion when generating text.

Using Caterpillar AI has also improved the productivity levels of Hotmob's customers' when it comes to online marketing.

By generating high-quality personalized text and images, Gemini enables us to build a powerful generative AI marketing tool that supports time-efficient, impactful marketing campaigns across industries.

Karen Leung

Chief Business Officer, Hotmob

Customers have increased posting frequency from three to 12 posts per week, and subsequently, enhanced audience engagement as well as outreach. Their marketing teams' productivity has increased by 33% on average, with administration workloads reduced by 50% through AI automation. 

"By generating high-quality personalized text and images, Gemini enables us to build a powerful generative AI marketing tool that supports time-efficient, impactful marketing campaigns across industries," notes Karen Leung, Chief Business Officer, Hotmob. "Our marketer users can swiftly produce the content they need, execute their campaigns, and achieve better results."

Supporting streamlined, high-performance data analytics with BigQuery

For the past 10 years, Hotmob has been using BigQuery as its primary data warehouse and established a centralized data pipeline around it. The company leverages Cloud Storage to store its raw data, which are then transformed into aggregated datasets through Dataflow. The datasets are transferred in BigQuery for advanced analytics, while data visualization is seamlessly realized by connecting BigQuery directly to Looker Studio, which reduces Hotmob's workload on report generation coding development.

Prior to Google Cloud, Hotmob relied on manual coding to generate daily or monthly reports for analysis, resulting in a great number of data pipelines and fragmented data. However, as its data volume and dimensions grew, the Hotmob team needed a more scalable tool to accommodate its expanding analytical needs.

Chow notes that the data pipeline centered around BigQuery has greatly enhanced the productivity of Hotmob's data team, as well as the company's decision-making efficiency and effectiveness. The high scalability and query performance supported by BigQuery allow Hotmob's data scientists to perform dynamic and complex analyses quickly, generating deeper insights for more informed data-driven decision-making. On top of that, with the ability to partition queries, BigQuery further enhances query performance to facilitate ad hoc analyses.

Expanding AI application with the latest technologies

Leveraging the industry-leading AI capabilities of Google Cloud, we've successfully helped our customers improve their marketing performance through swift content generation. Moving forward, we'll expand our AI solutions to enable our customers to achieve more.

Karen Leung

Chief Business Officer, Hotmob

With access to the industry-leading AI capabilities of Google Cloud, Hotmob is now set to be at the front of AI adoption in Hong Kong. The company is already testing Gemini 1.5 Pro, the latest Gemini model, by putting it into production for its generative AI-powered marketing solution. It will also build new AI models to support features such as pdf analysis with Model Garden on Vertex AI, which allows easy model customization to shorten time to market.

Karen Leung says, "Leveraging the industry-leading AI capabilities of Google Cloud, we've successfully helped our customers improve their marketing performance through swift content generation. Moving forward, we'll expand our AI solutions to enable our customers to achieve more."

Founded in 2007, Hotmob is a data-centric media company offering data and media services designed for marketers and brands. Its core services include data enrichment, custom audience creation, digital campaign consultation, media placement, and monitoring. In 2024, Hotmob launched Caterpillar AI, a marketing generative AI tool that enables time-efficient marketing.

Industry: Media & Entertainment

Location: Hong Kong

Products: Vertex AI, BigQuery, Cloud Storage, Dataflow, Looker Studio

Google Cloud