The latest competitor in adtech’s artificial intelligence race made a flashy entrance in New York this week. The advertising platform Kargo introduced Karlo, its new agentic AI platform, at a star-studded event before clients and publishers.
Karlo combines Kargo’s proprietary performance data, premium audience data and Kargo’s contextual signals to power a group of AI agents that can perform most of the planning, buying and creative functions required to launch campaigns through natural language prompts. The company claims this will allow smaller marketing teams to plan, create, and activate campaigns across the Internet, CTV, and social media from one system and activate quickly at scale. The setup takes minutes and campaigns can be adjusted in real time.
Campaigns can be launched and adjusted and reporting can be handled, all from a single self-serve platform. The agents are able to combine workflows and media buys, incorporating existing creative into real-time decision-making, scoring and adjustments, along with targeting and bidding.
During the launch event, the company demonstrated the platform using real-life clients as models, including retailer American Eagle Outfitters, beauty brand Sulwhasoo and the energy drink Gorgie. For American Eagle, the platform pulled together a holiday online campaign in minutes, from taking the brief to targeting audiences and orchestrating inventory to reach them.
The platform’s creative agent, Leonardo, can take assets and perform a real-time creative review to choose what makes sense for the brand’s goals, noted Casey Gordon, Kargo’s director of product, creative.
The ability to browse creative assets built for the brand and adapt them with no design experience necessary is a key feature, noted Michelle Cordeiro Grant, founder and CEO of Gorgie. The Kargo demonstration showed how the Karlo platform can browse assets including images and video and adapt them with a few keystrokes.
“Think of all the time we are saving on monotonous tasks,” said Cordeiro Grant. “We’re unlocking a whole new channel.”
The platform can also activate campaigns by building contextual audiences, using content signals and pairing them with publishing inventory. The number of personas it can generate in seconds is “amazing,” said Jazmine Gonzalez, senior manager, performance marketing at Sulwhasoo.
“It’s a huge timesaver for us,” said Gonzalez. She noted Karlo can factor in budget and targeting and then either adapt existing creative or build new assets, all using natural language prompts.
The Karlo platform makes Kargo’s capabilities available to a wider scope of clients than the company had been able to service before, said Harry Kargman, founder and CEO of Kargo. Over all its years in business, it had faced the challenge of growing its client base but being “maxed out,” said Kargman. Karlo is an option for partners who want to self-service AI technology, he said. He noted how the demonstration showed it was able to launch three campaigns in about 10 minutes.
“This takes the power of Kargo and puts it in the hands of small business,” he said. No single platform has figured out how to unlock all these capabilities across all kinds of media before, a key differentiator for Kargo, he said.
Kargman acknowledged the platform launched with more effective functionality for awareness campaigns, but Kargo is already working on fine-tuning Karlo’s performance marketing capabilities. He noted Kargo has agreements with Amazon and Walmart Connect that will add data to enable more performance marketing efforts, but “there is more work to do.” Kargo’s internal outcomes team is “so close,” he said.
Gordon noted the work continues to improve the platform and there they “have a lot of exciting things coming,” including more publishing partnerships. Karlo will be able to innovative with brands in other formats, she said.
