The tech stacks brands were using 10 years ago probably aren’t suited for today’s fragmented ecosystem, where advertisers are struggling to keep track of and unify the data they’ve accrued over years.
As supplement brand Ritual recently expanded into wholesale and third-party vendor sales, it decided it was time to “reevaluate” its tech stack to get easy access to all the new data that was rapidly coming in, as well as the years of historical data on file, SVP of Technology Daniel Archer told AdExchanger.
The brand integrated with Shopify as part of its goal to adopt what Archer described as “e-commerce best practices” and has been working with commerce data platform Chord for about six months to help with the adoption and connect all of its historical data to the platform.
On Wednesday, Chord announced $7 million in funding, led by Equal Ventures, to help more brands like Ritual get “a little bit closer” to their data and access everything in one place, according to Bryan Mahoney, Chord’s co-founder and CEO.
Wise investments
A tech platform is only as successful as its marketing – and that’s one area where Chord is looking to up its game.
Although word of mouth makes for a good origin story – and, incidentally, is how Ritual initially heard about Chord – it’s “not the way that you scale a platform,” said Mahoney, which is why a chunk of the funding will go toward investing more in marketing, including increased hiring.
Chord also plans to invest more in its AI-powered engine. This includes developing more agents, bringing in more data and developing its MCP server.
The MCP component is crucial to scaling the business, because “as much as we always want [our brand clients] to be operating within Chord,” Mahoney said, “we know that they have other tools.”
The breadth of Chord’s context and data need to be available, he added, “wherever our brands are operating.”
Leaving the house
Ten years ago, most brands had in-house tech stacks, said Mahoney. Now, more brands are taking a “platform approach” and adopting tools like Chord, where they can access all of their data in one place.
By using Chord, Ritual’s marketing team can hand off rote tasks like dashboard creation and data analytics to an agent, with a simple natural-language prompt, said Mahoney, and focus on the more complex elements of their campaigns, like creative ideation.
Chord puts an emphasis on context throughout its tech stack to understand how each of its clients makes decisions. The stack looks “sort of like a layer cake,” Mahoney said. At the base is a foundation of data, pulled from whatever platforms its clients use for marketing, from Meta to Klaviyo, as well as Chord’s pixel for tracking customer journeys.
Then there are “human annotations” specific to the brand, like how it defines revenue or specific regulations surrounding data governance, said Mahoney. The final layer is domain knowledge specific to commerce. Metric definitions and decision patterns are encoded into this layer and include category-specific data, since, as Mahoney pointed out, “a good AOV [average order value] in CPG isn’t a good AOV in consumer electronics.”
With all of the context built directly into the system, Ritual can query the platform regarding how its repeat rate of prenatal supplement purchases compares to its competitors. “The system already knows what repeat rate means, how subscription cohorts behave and what reasonable looks like for supplements specifically,” Mahoney added.
Easy access
By the time it integrated with Shopify, Ritual had 10 years of historical data, including product orders and subscriber lists. The main focus of the integration was being able to understand consumer behavior over time, and that data needed to be accessible immediately, said Archer, so the brand wasn’t “starting from day one.”
It’s too soon to draw any conclusions about performance or audience insights, Archer said, but Chord has already helped it expand its audience for specific products and campaigns, particularly its pregnancy products.
Ritual is using Chord’s AI tools to pull data on long-term customers, people who have purchased pregnancy supplements from them in the past and active subscribers. Those customers become the model for new lookalike audiences in Meta and Google.
The partnership with Chord, while still early, has been “exactly what we were looking for,” said Archer. At the end of the day, he added, Ritual was looking for a partner that “understood e-commerce more than anything” and can help the brand make the most of its ever-growing collection of data.