The solution
360i runs paid-search campaigns for some of the world's largest advertisers, bidding across millions of keywords, seasons, geographies, devices and audience segments.
Its Digital Nervous System uses natural-language processing to pair keywords with ad copy, forecasting to allocate budgets, and predictive bidding that treats linguistic similarity as a proxy for performance when data is sparse.
INFORMS credited the system with $250 million in client cost savings and nearly $1 billion in incremental revenue, and named 360i a 2016 Franz Edelman finalist.
What it achieved
Optimize bids across keywords like a portfolio
Why it worked
Bids are computed for every keyword instead of managed one campaign at a time.
Sparse-keyword bids borrow signal from similar keywords through language models.
Real-time auction monitoring fixes underperformance before budgets leak.
Budget allocation, ad copy and bids are optimized as one system.
What can be applied
When a market is opaque and high-dimensional, model the auction itself and let optimization place every bet; sparse data can borrow strength from similar cases.
Aftermath
360i's Digital Nervous System remained a flagship offering after Dentsu Aegis Network acquired the agency, and the Edelman citation is used as a case study in advertising analytics and auction-based bidding.
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