Ad:tech New York is taking place this week and that means much of the online advertising universe is focused on the growing advertising technology ecosystem. While our teams are out walking the ad:tech NY tradeshow floor to get a sense of the latest trends and opportunities, our CEO, Ofer Druker, spent some time at the exclusive AppNexus Summit in New York City to speak about how Matomy has gained significant market share in performance-based advertising through smart acquisitions, organic growth and strategic partnerships.
Speaking with AppNexus Senior Vice President Lauren Nemeth during a session titled, “Ofer Druker’s Guide to Gaining Market share,” Ofer touched on a number of topics that will resonate with any online advertising entrepreneur or CEO.
These included: how to ensure partnerships are successful for all parties; how to build a stable and sustainable business; his four Cs for success in acquisitions; and why Matomy is making a big investment in mobile.
Below are excerpts from Ofer’s discussion at the 2013 AppNexus Summit.
On Matomy’s formula for success …
We started Matomy Media Group in 2007 and decided to utilize a performance-based advertising formula as our way of delivering results for clients. We don’t charge any setup or maintenance fees, unlike many online ad or affiliate networks. Clients only pay us for results, which means they take no risk when working with us. We view our advertisers as partners of our business, not as clients. There is a difference and it comes down to who benefits from the relationship. To us, a successful online ad campaign for one of our advertisers is when both we and the advertiser benefit. That comes from delivering real performance and actual ROI for advertisers, rather than promises.
On why Matomy is building a multichannel approach to performance marketing …
A multichannel approach to growth
We realized very early in the history of Matomy that we needed to build a multichannel approach to our performance-based advertising offering. Advertisers need scale, speed and simplicity in order to achieve true results from their online marketing campaigns. A lot more performance-based advertising budgets are bleeding into multichannel campaigns, instead of focused on one specific media channel.
In the last year we accelerated our focus on building a multichannel business via smart acquisitions, first with the U.S.-based performance media company MediaWhiz [in January], then with mobile affiliate network MobAff [in July] and last month with our acquisition of Adquant’s social advertising agency, formerly known as Adotomi. Each of these acquisitions gave us the scale, expertise and clients to compete in key markets and verticals. But, more importantly, they allowed us to offer advertisers, networks and publishers a range of online marketing opportunities integrated through one gateway, including an award-winning affiliate network, display ad network, mobile advertising solutions, email marketing, search and social marketing, video and virtual currency platforms.
On Matomy’s competitive edge …
We believe that our multichannel approach gives us a competitive edge. There are a lot of giants in the online advertising industry, including Google and Facebook, that do many great things for advertisers and publishers. But when you are able to offer a cross-channel approach you give advertisers an advantage over those large, monolithic companies that offer a more simplistic, straightforward approach to online advertising. We believe the multichannel, single gateway approach that we have built is a better option for most advertisers than working with one of the giants that offers a one-size-fits-all, cookie-cutter approach to online advertising.
On how Matomy is building a sustainable business …
Whenever you are building a multichannel business, you have to realize that you can’t do everything. You need to rely on key partners that will provide you with some of the solution that you can then innovative or customize on top of in order to fit your company’s needs. You also need to make smart acquisitions that will help you add the missing parts of your offering. We did both over the past year by focusing on what we believe are the four Cs of success with online marketing acquisitions:
Country — It’s imperative that you make acquisitions that help you get into specific countries and markets in which you can’t organically build a presence. For example, we did this at Matomy last January when we acquired our way into the U.S. market via our acquisition of MediaWhiz.
Acquire more media channels in order to provide a more diverse, multichannel offering to advertisers and publishers
Clients — Smart acquisitions will allow you to pick up a diverse range of clients, giving you not only more scale but also prestige and knowledge about the advertising landscape of a country.
Channels — You need to acquire more media channels in order to provide a more diverse, multichannel offering to advertisers and publishers. We achieved this with our acquisition of Adquant’s social advertising agency, which gave us the ability to bring performance-based solutions to Facebook advertisers.
Capabilities — Look for acquisition opportunities that will enhance and expand your capabilities. Scale is important but scale without the right capabilities is meaningless.
At Matomy, we are looking all the time to acquire new companies and assets in order to grow for success and innovation
On how to find success in ad-tech partnerships …
Successful ad-tech partnerships are about choosing the right partner that will help you grow your business smartly and strategically. Don’t just partner with a company because they are the biggest or have the most publicity. Partner with companies in both sides will benefit so that there is a reason to keep the partnership strong.
You need to share the same values as your partner and have a similar mindset toward growth in order for the partnership to be a success.
You can’t build everything in ad-tech. You need innovation. It’s not just about the technology you have. It’s about being flexible in order to connect off-the-shelf products like a Lego piece: to connect third-party products to your business in order to innovative and build. AppNexus enables us to be flexible with our ad-tech offering but also gives us scale, which is why we have seen great success by partnering with it for several years now.
On Matomy’s future in mobile …
Mobile is integrated throughout the entire company. We didn’t silo mobile within its own unit. We built mobile into every division and every facet of our business. We call it “mobile everywhere” It has to be. Companies that aren’t aware of this need and don’t adjust to having mobile integrated throughout their business risk serious headwinds in the future