Christie's Is Adopting Ad Tech in a Digital Transformation

Christie's auction house is in the news today for becoming the first major auction house to offer a purely digital work of art with a unique NFT—and it did so with an eye-popping final bid of $69.3 million. But NFTs aren't the only 21st century technology being adopted by the 255-year-old auction house. Christie’s has teamed up with Quantcast and will be using ad tech to prospect for new customers. The partnership is part of a near decade-long shift in Christie’s DNA. The ABCs of NFTs: A Guide to Non-Fungible Tokens, the Cryptomedia Trend Bringing Ownership to the Internet “When I started, our [IT] management system was MS-DOS and it was older than I am,” explained Samantha Margolis, vp and digital marketing director. "Bringing a heritage brand into digital marketing is what’s super interesting to me," Margolis told Adweek. Christie’s latest ad-tech efforts involve using the Quantcast Platform, a buy-side tool that uses its Ara technology to help advertisers identify their desired audiences. Margolis compared many ad-tech offerings to “the gift basket that you can’t see inside of” and said the results were often disappointing. “The data is often very stale, but with Quantcast it’s quite well pieced together, and you can see that this is luxury [quality],” she added. Given that Christie’s addressable customer base is a “niche group of people” Margolis’ team also makes use of Quantcast Platform’s AI and machine-learning capabilities to data model lookalike audiences to identify prospects. “It’s very much about quality over quantity, as you want the people that actually care about us and are going to sign up with their email address or register for an auction,” she added. Luxury brands are not often associated with digital marketing innovation, often due to the popularly held perception that “digital is too democratizing,” but the societal shifts accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic have changed this. For someone like Christie’s, you have to be where your customers are.Ana Milicevic, Sparrow Advisers “The last year has really made folks who wouldn't necessarily normally be on the forefront of digital rethink their strategy,” said Ana Milicevic, cofounder of Sparrow Advisers. “For someone like Christie’s, you have to be where your customers are, and we’ve seen this with some high-end, luxury brands in fashion and retail that have also started to get into ecommerce, and by extension digital [advertising] channels.” Last year, Christie’s did likewise with its number of online auctions increasing considerably. Margolis told Adweek the concept of using ad tech to address relevant audiences on different websites with automated ad placements did require a considerable amount of education internally. Automated advertising clearly brings with it concerns around brand safety. The subject of brands steering clear of controversial topics online has become a hot-button issue during the course of the pandemic, with the process often labor-intensive. Quantcast CEO Konrad Feldman told Adweek that his company’s recently launched platform is geared toward minimizing these efforts, and he claimed that Quantcast’s machine learning helps streamline this process. “Buying on the open web is harder [than within the walled gardens], as there’s a lot of differences that need to be considered,” he said. “On the open web you have to pull data from a DMP, then go into a DSP and translate your hypothesis into specific configurations and settings. It gets really complicated.” Margolis of Christie's said the company’s rapid shift toward digitization was crystalized in the cutback of its printed catalogs over the course of the pandemic. “The fact that a company like us is willing to forgo traditional catalogs is a huge marker,” she said, adding, “Now we’ve been able to present the data behind the [automated] ads with the new clients," which all helps bring this storied 18th century auction house into the future.

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Christie's Isn't Just Adopting NFTs as Part of Its Digital Transformation

The auction house uses Quantcast Platform to find high-net-worth clients

Ronan Shields

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