Some campaigns earn recognition for the idea behind them. Others earn it for the system built to keep improving that idea, week after week. At the AIM Summit, an event built around the intersection of AI and marketing, Nians won two awards for exactly that second kind of work: AI in Performance Optimization Excellence and the AI-Driven Customer Insights Award, both for Freedo Rentals.
The two awards recognise two different layers of the same strategy, so here’s a look at each on its own terms.
AI-Driven Customer Insights Award
Freedo Rentals operates across multiple cities, each with its own rhythm of customer habits, demand and vehicle availability. That variety shaped the whole approach: understanding who was genuinely likely to convert,and building strategy around that understanding. We drew on a wide spread of signals, location, age, ad engagement, app-install activity, booking behaviour and cost-to-revenue patterns, to build that picture. The 18-44 age group emerged as a particularly strong segment, and city-level data revealed how differently the same campaign could perform depending on where it ran.
The real craft was turning that understanding into decisions, letting a simple chain of questions, who’s responding, where are they, are they booking, connect customer behaviour directly to media investment. That’s what this award recognised: insight shaping the spend.
AI in Performance Optimization Excellence
The second award looked at what happened once those insights were in hand. Google and Meta’s machine-learning capabilities, layered on top of that data, let campaigns evaluate enormous volumes of signals in real time and decide who to reach, what to bid and when, at a scale built for speed. Outcomes stayed at the centre of it all, installs, bookings, cost per booking and ROAS, with surface metrics like CTR serving as useful diagnostics along the way.
Creative played its part too, with offer-led, city-specific and app-install formats tested side by side so performance data could reveal what each audience actually responded to, turning every test into another source of intelligence for the next round.
A System That Never Stops Learning
What ties both awards together is a loop that keeps running. Customer behaviour generates data, that data reveals signals worth acting on, campaigns adjust accordingly, new users respond, and the cycle starts again. It’s a small shift in thinking with a large effect: optimization becomes something the campaign does to itself, continuously, while it’s still live.
Where Judgment Still Leads
AI carried the work that needed scale, processing enormous volumes of signals, bidding in real time, catching conversion opportunities the moment they appeared. The team carried the work that needed direction, deciding what the business was working towards, setting the creative strategy, choosing where a market needed a different offer, and reading the data closely enough to know when it called for a bigger shift. Together, the two moved at a pace neither could have reached alone, and that combination is really what these two awards were recognising.
The Trust That Made It Work
Working with Freedo Rentals meant working with a brand ready to let data make the call, even when that meant rethinking budgets city by city or letting a creative test decide the message. That openness is the reason this system could grow as far as it did.
What’s Next
Two awards down, and plenty more signals left to learn from. If your brand is ready for the same kind of thinking, let’s talk.
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