Brand safety asks if an ad placement is right for the brand. Parallel asks if it’s right for the customer — using AI-simulated digital twins to find out.
Rob Hall, co-founder of Playground xyz, the attention-based advertising platform acquired by GumGum in 2021, announced his return to adtech with the launch of Parallel, an industry-first platform introducing Customer Suitability — a new approach to media buying that aims to bring the voice of the customer into every advertising impression.
Launched in Sydney and London, Parallel allows brands to quantify and optimize resonance — the fit between a customer, an ad, and the content they’re viewing — across live advertising campaigns.
While brand safety and brand suitability help advertisers avoid harmful environments and align campaigns with brand values, Customer Suitability asks a question the industry has never systematically answered: not just whether a video placement is right for a brand, but whether it is right for the customer viewing it. The development marks an essential new addition to the industry’s core targeting toolkit, for brands that want their ads to truly resonate.
Rob Hall, CEO of Parallel, said: “Today, impressions are checked for brand safety and brand suitability — but never for whether they’re right for the customer. That’s Customer Suitability: the missing piece, and the one Parallel set out to solve.
“Using the customer’s voice as a signal adds huge value to the millions of activation decisions brands make every day. Delivered via human-calibrated digital twins, we simulate and score the resonance between a customer, an ad, and the content it runs against, then push that into real-time activation.”
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Parallel combines proprietary AI, large-scale datasets, and digital twins — synthetic replicas of consumers used elsewhere to test and predict outcomes across industries, including healthcare, aviation, and manufacturing — to bring the customer’s perspective directly into the bidstream. The technology is focused on video environments and platforms.
Parallel’s digital twins achieve 80.4% accuracy when compared with real human responses. They can answer millions of questions in seconds, allowing brands to simulate customer reactions to creative and content combinations at scale. Hall describes the technology as “a virtual focus group that happens before every impression you buy.”
Industry research from IAS shows that optimizing for creative and content fit can deliver 4 times higher unaided recall, 2 times higher favourability, and 1.5 times higher receptivity.
“Backtests against our simulations show positive gains to media metrics, brand lift, and conversion rates,” Hall said. “We’re on the first step of a big journey, but, as we hoped, our notion of Customer Suitability, in addition to driving more positive advertising generally, can also be linked to positive outcomes. Happily, it seems that what works for your customers works for your brand too.”
Parallel optimizes for resonance by using a brand’s creative assets and audience inputs to match with 1,000 AU- or UK-calibrated human digital twins, or brands can bring their own audience data. The platform simulates how different customer segments respond to creative across a wide range of video content, assigns each customer-creative-content combination a resonance score supported by qualitative and quantitative rationale, ranks combinations to prioritize the highest-resonance opportunities within the media buy, and continuously re-scores and re-optimizes campaigns as new content becomes available.
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The transformative value of customer preference data in the media buying and planning process has been widely discussed by brands and their agencies in recent years. Jack Cantwell, Global Client Lead at Dentsu, said: “One powerful lever for creating meaningful competitive advantage is by gaining a high-resolution and dynamic understanding of audiences — and another is agile execution. Parallel is well-positioned to help brands maximize the value of their data and capitalize on algorithmic opportunities — creating impact through the full marketing value chain.”
Dan Glynn, Media Buying Lead at Heineken, added: “Bringing the customer’s voice into media decision-making has the potential to make advertising more relevant for consumers and more effective for brands.”
Hall co-founded Playground XYZ in Sydney in 2015. The company rapidly expanded globally, establishing offices in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Auckland, Singapore, London, New York, and Los Angeles. Like Playground xyz, Parallel is backed by Sydney-based venture capital firm Shearwater Capital, which has invested AU$4 million in the new venture as part of a seed round.
Zac Zavos, Managing Partner at Shearwater Capital, said: “Rob stands out globally as one of the true leaders in adtech. Playground xyz shaped how a whole industry thinks about Attention in digital media. Along the way, he and the team built a great business that we were fortunate to back. With Parallel, they have again made a breakthrough for brand advertisers. Consumer Suitability is the ideal metric to optimize toward right now and we were excited by the depth of technology and data science the Parallel team has brought to life. We are thrilled to be back again as the company launches in two markets concurrently.”
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Parallel launches with a six-person team based in London and Sydney. In London, Hall is joined by Ben Dimond, UK Managing Director, and Billy Gittins, Senior Sales Lead.
