Simon Larcey is the Managing Director at Viztrade and talks with Darren on how he has developed an end-to-end solution for advertisers to access premium media publisher inventory through a self service programmatic solution. Viztrade is designed to provide visible programmatic trading for advertisers and a marketplace for media providers who often get lost or overlooked in the open digital marketplace.
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Transcription
Darren:
Welcome to Managing Marketing and today I’m sitting down with Simon Larcey who’s the Managing Director of Viztrade and happens to be in town, so thanks for calling by, Simon.
Simon:
No problems, thank you for having me.
Darren:
Well thanks for popping in to the office. But Viztrade, you know, I’ve read a few things in the trade media and obviously this is a bit of a pet project for you?
Simon:
Yeah, look, I’ve worked in digital media and advertising for over twenty years and I really love the industry. When I was a kid at school, in senior school I was like “I want to work in media. I want to work in advertising”. So I got into the digital space and started playing around in a programmatic business and it’s giving advertising a bad rap and it was just annoying the hell out of me.
Darren:
Yeah, it’s interesting isn’t it? Because people will hear the word, ‘programmatic’, and they immediately start thinking… lack of transparency, rip-off, rebates, all of that.
Simon:
Well it is.
Darren:
But it’s actually not the technology, is it? It’s the way it’s used. The technology is actually simply automating a trading system, isn’t it?
Simon:
It is, but it’s so expensive because no one’s created one system to do it all. So there’s multiple different vendors in a stack for any transaction.
Darren:
The technology stack?
Simon:
The technology stack, so when Mr. Advertiser says goodbye to his dollar, it goes through all these different people and by the time it reaches Mr. Publisher, there’s about thirty cents left.
Darren:
We’ve all seen that chart, the ANA.
Simon:
But that’s a fact, that happens because every business probably wants to take a minimum of a ten percent commission on using their service which is completely reasonable. But if it’s six or seven of them in one transaction, it’s just useless for the person with the money and the media space because you’re only getting thirty percent of exposure when you really needed to get the most of the exposure of media so the advertising is not very effective.
So the advertisers don’t feel very happy and the publishers are going broke because they’re not making any money.
Darren:
Well the publishers have been the ones complaining most about it because they do get such a small amount as cents in the dollar.
Simon:
Yeah. And that’s all driven by the fact that the majority of the money for the big publishers at least, come from agencies because trying to use what is currently a programmatic system directly would, it’s a head screw up you know? It’s very complicated systems and only agencies with their legacy systems have trained their staff to be able to use these things.
Things like Facebook an idiot can use. You can go and spend $200, easy. That’s why they’re so successful. Sure, they’ve got a ton of people, but it’s the ease of use. Anyone can logon to Facebook and buy Facebook advertising. No one can log onto a sophisticated programmatic system and buy advertising without having some sort of training or knowledge about how they work.
Darren:
And so is this the sort of challenge you set yourself in developing Viztrade?
Simon:
Yeah! So I was really one. I love advertising and I was annoyed that it was getting such a bad rap because of programmatic and I thought there’s got to be a better way to do it and I looked at the way that everything was done and I thought, “Well I don’t understand why you couldn’t just all bring that together” and then the big conversation about transparency.
No one actually knows where the money goes, you know? I’ve actually spoken to hundreds of agency staff over the last three or four years about, “Do you actually know if you pay $15 CPM or $10 CPM for your digital advert, how much of that actually reaches the publisher?” And they go, “Nah, that’s not our job”.
“But wouldn’t that impact the exposure you get on that publisher’s site?” And they go, “Well yeah, we’ll just keep spending more money”. Not a great solution.
So I decided to create a system that was fully transparent and that eliminated multiple intermediaries and enabled your unsophisticated media buyers to logon and buy advertising. And in order to make it somewhat recognisable or familiar, I model it on a stock exchange.
Because everyone can look at a stock exchange or an index and see how a particular stock is performing, what its price is, so we’ve built a system, when you login you’re presented with a dashboard and part of that dashboard is an index based on different media environments that we recommend you advertise on based on who you are as an advertiser and what your goal is.
Darren:
Right. So it actually takes into consideration the advertiser’s strategy, target audience, what they’re trying to achieve.
Simon:
Yes.
Darren:
And gives them advice on what would be the best buy.
Simon:
It uses a very basic machine learning algorithm to analyse what ads are performing best and where and recommends where you should be doing it because it knows when you login, who you are, what advertising category you are in and what goals you are trying to achieve.
Darren:
So it would be based on a lot of the data that comes from the publishers, that third-party data around who their readers are.
Simon:
Exactly. Yeah, yeah. So at launch stage, we’re keeping it very, very simple. I don’t want to go and complicate things by offering all sorts of sophisticated data ingestion so you can play around with audiences. We are purely a contextual buyer which means if you are a car dealer and you’re in Wollongong or Newcastle and you want to advertise on the Newcastle Newspaper website, you can.
As we develop the platform, probably we will be launching at the end of April. Come June, July, you’ll be able to ingest first-party data. I’m not getting involved with third-party data, I think that is on its way out. I think that there’s going to be a whole data revolution. So I don’t want to invest too much time on building technology systems to cater for third-party data when I don’t think it’s going to be around.
With what’s happened in Europe with the GDPR, what’s happened in California, Australia is going to have some privacy regulations put in place and the safe bet for now is to either offer advertisers contextual advertising on relevant environments or allow those advertisers to upload their first-party data that they own and then target their people across the network that we have as and when they want.
Darren:
Now one of the things that I’ve read is that you’ve gone and focused primarily on more premium or trusted publishers rather than just opening it. Because a lot of the programmatic trading desks, through ad exchanges and the like, can actually access vast amounts of inventory.
Simon:
Vast amounts of rubbish.
Darren:
Well, okay.
Simon:
Did you read the story about how JP Morgan advertised on four hundred and fifty, five hundred thousand websites. They went through it all and completely audited every single site. It was a twelve-month project. They went down to five thousand sites because only five thousand generated any clicks and their performance did not decrease whatsoever.
Possibly it improved, but the efficiency and the costs were substantially reduced because they weren’t bidding on half a million websites. Premium is incredibly important from a context perspective and, from a brand safety perspective, you know?
Brands don’t want to be associated with dodgy content. So we’ve literally focused on this niche media so anything from say, architecture magazines that have got a website of ten thousand regular users for example, to regional media that are servicing local communities.
Darren:
So there’s still quite a bit of diversity in there? I mean, when we talk about premium, some people might think that it’s only a handful of publishers, you’ve actually gone for quite a broad, diverse set of media?
Simon:
Yeah, yeah. And I class premium as people with a proper media business. We’re only in Australia too, by the way, so I….
Darren:
For now.
Simon:
For now, for now. And I know pretty much most of the publishers that are getting onboard and they’re all looking for help to monetise their inventory and all the advertisers that we’re approaching at this stage are ones that suit the inventory that we’ve got and they know it’s going to be safe for them to advertise. And if they go through us, they’ll probably get it a little bit cheaper because it’s done through an automated system rather than talking directly to the publisher.
Darren:
So this, some might say is a private market because you are limiting the number of publishers that are providing inventory and as you said before, it’s a direct relationship, you know?
Simon:
Yeah.
Darren:
You’ve built the end-to-end technology to be able to have that direct relationship.
Simon:
Yeah, yeah, we have. And look, we’re getting probably the biggest success from the regional media because they have struggled to get digital advertising revenue. And we’ve built up a rather large regional network now and we’re covering Western Australia, South Australia, Victoria, Tasmania, all of them. New South Wales and Queensland.
And now, I guess our unique offering from an inventory perspective at launch will be that we will cater and provide a great reach to regional Australia, so car manufacturers that need to reach their regional dealer network, government departments that need to reach regional Australia.
Darren:
I was thinking, this actually makes it ideal for local area marketing you know? Exactly what you were saying before.
Simon:
Exactly.
Darren:
Car dealers, government, local government or government departments will be able to target geographic and demographic audiences.
Simon:
Yeah, yeah!
Darren:
Across Australia.
Simon:
And they’ll be able to, just through their local community. And done so simply, you know? They just logon, create an account, “I live in Bairnsdale. I’m a Toyota dealer, I want to target people in Bairnsdale. Go on to the Bairnsdale advertiser website, I want to have that banner”, bang, it’ll be up there.
Darren:
It sounds to me you’ve got a very specific view of the type of advertiser that would be using this. Because you mentioned JP Morgan but perhaps it’s not going to be the big global advertiser that’s really going to get the benefit from this, or would they? Does Viztrade suit all advertisers?
Simon:
Well the technology does, yeah. But if you look at the digital advertising spend in Australia, I think the IAB say it’s about seven and a half, eight billion, might be even a bit more. The SMI index say it’s about two, two and a half billion, right? So there’s a three, four, five-billion-dollar gap. That all comes from advertisers direct.
Eighty percent of that gap would go to, to, Facebook and Google probably, because it’s easy to do. And it all comes from SMI business. So half of the digital ad spend in Australia would come from SMEs, without any agencies, no one’s catering for them.
Darren:
And at the moment they would be heavy users of Facebook and Google.
Simon:
Absolutely because they don’t have an option.
Darren:
And they could do it themselves and they would have a sense of that because they can use it, that they’ve got some sense of control.
Simon:
Yeah, exactly. And by introducing Viztrade, all of a sudden, they’ve got a third option which is, “I can actually advertise now the exact same way as I use Facebook or Google, but on my local website where I’ve had a relationship with the bloke that owns that for twenty years and been buying advertising in his newspaper.
Now he’s got quite a busy website, it’s always been too complicated, I don’t understand it. But now, I can just plug in and go. So that’s the whole idea. And what I’m hoping will follow suit is that the big boys will come onboard, we’ll have huge amounts of inventory and then agencies and global advertisers will want to use us in the future as well because we’ll cater for all types of niches and areas and audiences.
Darren:
Now, every time people talk about programmatic or digital media, the big question is around transparency.
Simon:
Yes.
Darren:
So you mentioned before that you wanted to base this around a sort of stock market model.
Simon:
Yes.
Darren:
What are the ways that this delivers against transparency? Because a lot of people say that it’s almost impossible to be completely transparent. Is that a furphy or a misnomer or are they trying. Have you achieved or will you achieve transparency?
Simon:
So the publishers put their inventory in the market at the price that they want to sell it for, visible to anybody that logs in. If an agency is buying on behalf of their client, they have to add their client to the system but adding their client to the system, it gives the client a username and password to login to the system.
So the client, at any time, can login to that account and see what the agency is doing and see how much they’re spending and what they’re actually buying for. So if the client gets an invoice from the agency that doesn’t match up with the CPM that they can see on the system and they haven’t already agreed that, they’ll know that they’re being robbed.
Darren:
But it trades doesn’t it, in realtime? Apart from the publisher putting a price there, won’t it be available to trade? So whatever the demand is at any particular time?
Simon:
On the realtime bidding scenario, yeah, it will go up and down. But people will see what it is.
Darren:
Yeah.
Simon:
They’ll see a last bid price, a current bid price and an offer price. The offer price is set by the publisher. It might be one cent above the current bid price, it might be a dollar. But the advertiser will know, if I want to buy that space now in the realtime bidding environment, I’ll have to pay the offer price. In the guaranteed environment, we have an automated guaranteed service, it’s just a fixed price for a fixed amount.
Darren:
It’s a rate card.
Simon:
Yeah, exactly.
Darren:
And that’s set by the publisher.
Simon:
Yeah. And for the unsophisticated advertisers, that’s going to be more popular.
Darren:
Because there’s certainty in what they’re going to pay for that inventory.
Simon:
Yeah and what they’re going to get. They’re not going to know anything, I mean, they’re going to go, “Hey I’ve just bought that and now the price is going up and I’ve lost it, what’s that all about?” That’s only advertising agencies that understand that and try to explain that to someone and it’s like, “Oh god no, we’ll just go with the standard guaranteed”, and then we’ll create a more sophisticated solution for the agencies.
Darren:
Well perhaps over time there’s an educational component where those advertisers can start to learn how realtime bidding can work to their advantage.
Simon:
Yeah, yeah. But I think also, realtime bidding is an incredibly heavy resource scenario. You know, I think I read something the other day that there are one trillion, not a billion, one trillion bid requests a day across the open exchange.
Darren:
Yes, there’s a trillion a day.
Simon:
How much terrain is that and most of it won’t be successful.
Darren:
They said a trillion plus.
Simon:
Yes.
Darren:
So it’s like we stopped counting at a trillion because that was enough.
Simon:
Like seriously, when this whole programmatic system was invented, who thought having six or seven players to deliver an ad was a good idea? And having to go through a trillion bid requests a day? I mean, the amount of power, that’s just the biggest waste of time, most inefficient way to do things.
Darren:
But you also understand why there’s been so many issues, you know? Fraudulent bots.
Simon:
Totally.
Darren:
You know, bot views, brand safety issues, ad fraud. They say it’s the second biggest source of criminal funds.
Simon:
Yeah it is.
Darren:
After illicit drugs.
Simon:
Yeah it is.
Darren:
This is because it’s incredibly complex to actually be able to track a trillion bid requests a day and to work out which ones are real, which ones aren’t, where the environment is that your ad shows up. All of those things become incredibly complex.
Simon:
But I can’t understand how anyone would sit there and go, “What a great system. That’s very efficient”. There’s got to be a better way. I’m trying to get rid of it all. I think the whole system of programmatic at the moment, programmatic, one is doing to die. Because it’s just not efficient, it’s ripping everybody off.
There’s heaps of fraud, more fraud than anyone can possibly imagine and by creating direct relationships, having some safety nets in place, brands can get what they want much more cost effectively. There isn’t a drain on the environment and the power and all the resources involved.
You don’t need all that.
Darren:
Well look, what you’re saying is logical except that programmatic expenditure is going out. You know? More money is being spent programmatically every day than the day before.
Simon:
It’s because they keep getting more and more, the results are getting worse and worse. So to improve the results, they’ve got to spend more money. I have been in this situation where I have seen someone say, “I’ve got a million bucks to do something. Our commission is X. The commission that we’ll pay you is X. What’s it going to cost us to reach an audience?”
“They’re like, about a dollar. So you know, let’s say we charge 10%, so there’s nine hundred grand to reach a particular audience for a campaign. A dollar a person, we can reach nine hundred thousand people”. “Yes, great, let’s go ahead”.
Get the people for twenty cents, pocket the rest of the money and then the client comes back and goes, “It didn’t work the way we thought”. “No, we need another million bucks”. It happens all the time. It happens all the time and it’s unnecessary.
Darren:
Well there’s also the other view which is the advertiser that’s not actually measuring clicks or leads or even acquisition, but they’re buying programmatic on impressions.
Simon:
Yes.
Darren:
So they’re buying cost per thousand impressions.
Simon:
Yes.
Darren:
And all they really want to do is buy it as cheap as possible.
Simon:
For what purpose?
Darren:
Well, to get as many impressions as possible because they think of it the same way as they thought about television or newspapers or any of the others, all we’re buying is eyeballs. They want to get their message out there to as many people as possible.
And in fact, a lot of the industry has been selling impressions as a message because it becomes a cheaper way of reaching eyeballs than a lot of the traditional media. Now, it’s only in the last four, three or four years, that all of the consequences of that thinking have become known but it’s still not necessarily getting through to the advertiser because there’s a lot of people that have a vested interest in pushing through as much of the advertising budget into programmatic as possible and you can sell it on cheap cost per thousand.
Simon:
But it’s just not good value and as a marketing director of any organisation your job should be to get business outcomes. Your job is to sell the stuff that you’ve got to make money.
Darren:
Yeah, but if you’re a consumer-packaged goods advertiser and you’ve got a limited budget, media budget, I can put it on television or any of the traditional media and get a certain reach and frequency. And my cost per thousand on average would be X.
And then someone comes along and goes, “You know what? Everyone’s actually online, we can give you the same exposure to that audience and do it for a tenth of the price, a tenth of the cost per thousand”. Right? It becomes incredibly attractive because you know what?
They cannot measure the actual sales because it happens through a retailer or through someone else. They’re not actually wanting to get clicks, they’re not actually wanting to get someone to come to them, they’re purely using it as measuring exposure, raising awareness of their brand through digital media. And I’ve actually had these conversations.
Simon:
Yeah, I know.
Darren:
I’ve had a conversation with a senior CMO that’s said, “How much should I be spending on digital media and programmatic?” And I said, “What are you trying to achieve?” And he goes, “Awareness.” And I said, “Well, probably very little”.
Simon:
I’m a firm believer, digital media should be and could be the most countable media there is. So therefore, like Viztrade, all about performance. Performance media, it’s about getting results. I lived in London for eighteen years and I worked with a lot of agencies. There was one agency in particular, when Facebook was going nuts in 2007 or 8 over there and one particular CMA told their agency, “I don’t care what you do, just get me likes on Facebook. I want to build up my likes.”
And it’s like, “Well, what for?” “We just need likes on Facebook”. It’s like, that didn’t drive business or sales, people, and they were like, “Well we could buy a whole heap of people, just to like your site”. It makes no commercial sense if you’re looking to generate business, you need to come up with a strategy that generates business. Buying cheap, rubbish inventory across the open exchange, crossing your fingers and hoping it’s going to drive awareness and some sort of result, they wouldn’t even know.
Darren:
Well, I think the big thing that happened here was the global recession in 2007/2008.
Simon:
Yes.
Darren:
You said that for twenty years you’ve been passionate about digital media. So you’ll remember that technology, the promise of this technology at the turn of the century was the interactive media where you could target people one on one and you could get people to respond and to be able to have a conversation in real time at scale.
Simon:
Yeah, yeah.
Darren:
Except somewhere along the way, and I think it was when money got tight around 2007/2008, all those big investors in the technology platforms that you’re talking about, all those companies that all have a piece of that supply chain that we call programmatic digital media, all said the only way we’re going to make money is if we sell on lowest cost per thousand.
We stopped talking about being able to be interactive at scale and we talk about eyeball delivery at a lower price than traditional media.
Simon:
But now we’ve come out the other side and most people have realised that it just doesn’t work.
Darren:
Okay so the question is, if people have realised that, if people realised that lowest cost per thousand through programmatic or digital media doesn’t work, why are we seeing the amount spent on programmatic trading desks increasing every year?
In fact, it either has or is about to surpass traditional media in the U.S.
Simon:
Yeah, you’re right. It’s already surpassed it in Australia.
Darren:
So if it’s increasing like this and we know that it doesn’t work, what’s going on? When we say it doesn’t work, sure, it may be getting exposure, it may be delivering the impressions that they’re paying for, but why are they paying for impressions?
Simon:
Yeah, that’s a good question. And I’ve heard this conversation with a number of people that are like, “I don’t understand, I don’t even know why we’re spending more money on this because it doesn’t drive the results that it should”.
Darren:
I’ve got a marketer who phoned me up and said, “You know, dealing with my media agency about programmatic media is like sitting in the back seat of a car at night going a hundred kilometres an hour down the freeway with all the lights turned off”.
Simon:
Right.
Darren:
And all I can hear is the agency sitting in the driver’s seat saying, “Let’s go faster, let’s go faster!” She said whenever she asks about what they should be doing, to your point before, it’s, “You need to invest more money. You need to put more money into this and we’ll get the results that you’re looking for”.
Simon:
Yeah. I don’t think that’s the right approach .
Darren:
So this trade is going to be for the advertisers that do want to get results, is that what you’re saying?
Simon:
Yeah! Well the whole idea is that we’re a performance platform and we like helping people be successful. You get a fuzzy feeling when you actually see a result you know?
I had another tech business and we used to make games on Facebook. And people would play the game and we would capture their information, that was part of it. They could play this game and go in the draw to win something in return for we knew who they were.
And then we’d build up a little bit of a database, and it would be for brand X, right? And then two or three months later, we’d cross reference that database with the brands online database or new database and we would see all these new people had actually gone across and bought something and the brand had never heard about them pre that game or they had no record of it.
So I was all, “Well that’s pretty cool, look…fifty people here”. So I actually like seeing results and yeah, look, there’s nothing better than having your brand splashed around everywhere so everybody knows about it, but you’re selling your product to make money and at the end of the day, you want to sell your product. So come up with the best possible solution to sell your product.
Darren:
So you mentioned before, the number that gets bandied around, about eighty percent of all digital media is going through either Facebook or Google.
Simon:
Facebook or Google, yes.
Darren:
And some people are now saying Amazon is increasingly part of that.
Simon:
Yes, totally.
Darren:
Okay. I wonder how much of that eighty percent is actually driving sales and how many advertisers are investing in Facebook and Google and Amazon, purely to get awareness or they’re not actually measuring performance but the reason they use those platforms is because they’re just easy to do and they deliver a low cost per thousand.
Simon:
Well that’s it! They’re so easy to do. And the thing is, the low cost per thousand, when you go on any of those platforms, you define what your budget is. You say, “My budget is X and I’m prepared to bid this much or spend this much”, whatever.
Darren:
And they will tell you what sort of reach you will get for that budget.
Simon:
Exactly, exactly! So exactly the same with…
Darren:
$43 will get you twelve thousand people.
Simon:
Exactly the same with Viztrade. You go in and you just say what budget you want to spend, whether it’s fifty bucks, a hundred bucks, a million bucks. And based on the level of inventory that we have and the impressions that we have, you’ll know exactly what you’re going to get before you even spend your money.
It was the ease of use that we said before that has made Facebook and Google so successful, that will make Amazon successful, everyone knows how to use Amazon because they’ve been buying books off Amazon for years and all the other stuff. Now it’s just another option, actually I can advertise on Amazon, “I’m a bookshop. That’s perfect.” You know? “I sell diving gear. There’s diving gear on here. I’m just going to put an ad around the diving gear section”.
And then it goes back to context, why is the local dive shop wanting to advertise on Amazon around diving equipment? Because they reckon they’re going to sell more stuff around diving equipment because the people looking at the diving equipment area are interested in diving equipment.
So they’ll try and chuck on some ads there too. So the article that I did recently, that I wrote was about context. Context is so important when it comes to advertising. You can chase audiences all your life but you know, if you’re an eighteen to thirty-five-year-old bloke and you’re looking on some sites that you probably shouldn’t be, it’s not going to be a great time to reach you as an advertiser.
But if you go to a fishing website, chances are you’re interested in fishing and you’re looking for something about fishing. If you put an ad there, it will probably have a better result than the other site that’s got nothing to do with a man fishing.
Darren:
So, you know, go beyond just reaching an audience, and start thinking about the environment and also the mindset.
Simon:
Yeah, yeah.
Darren:
How engaged they are in that experience.
Simon:
Yeah, well so my long game with Viztrade is to be able to target in the right place, the right person, at the right time. And I’ve already got in my mind and I’ve spoken to my dev team about the architecture that would be required to achieve that and you know, they complicate it, in my opinion, maybe I’m just underestimating the level of work required. I don’t know.
Because I always tell my dev team, “Boys, nothing’s impossible. There’s always a solution to a problem, we’ve just got to find it”. So we’ll see what happens but I think that look, we’re all about performance. I like driving results, I like to be able to show people that we’re effective and I’m hoping that as the platform officially launches at the end of April and moves forward, we become a really valuable marketing tool for both the SME market and later on, national and global brands.
Darren:
So just to recap, it’s an end-to-end solution, so there’s not all these different technology stakeholders at every step.
Simon:
No! We charge one transactional fee and that’s the only fee charged. And from a publisher perspective, there is no fee. Publishers can onboard their inventory on our system for no charge. And then we will charge an advertiser anywhere between seven and a half and twelve and a half percent transactional fee. It’s the only fee.
Darren:
Right, and then it’s a private marketplace because there’s only trusted or you know…
Simon:
Brand safe, trusted, premium content partners, yes.
Darren:
Okay. And you’ve just said there’s a completely transparent fee that is known upfront.
Simon:
Yes.
Darren:
And it’s also self-serve so that advertisers can do this themselves or they could get their agency to do it or.
Simon:
Yes and we’ll offer a managed service too for some of the agencies. Some of the agencies don’t have the resources to be able to work every system and it’s easier right, “We’ve got this budget for this audience, you’ve got that audience. We’ll just give that to you, you run with it, send us a monthly report.”
Darren:
And the other one was that you’ve got some machine learning or algorithms that will start to help the advertiser.
Simon:
Yeah, totally.
Darren:
Actually match the type of environments or the type of publishers that they should be targeting or using.
Simon:
Yeah, exactly. Based on who they are, what their goal is, and where they are. So look, there’s a lot of work to do. This is a massive job building the technology and I’m like this mad professor with all these ideas but so far, it’s been very, very good developing it and we’ve been in Beta testing and we’re getting some very happy publishers and we’ve run a few advertising campaigns that are driving results so the more data we collect and the bigger the platform becomes, the more useful it will be for everybody.
Darren:
And what do you think the chances are of someone, one of the big boys coming along and just buying you and shutting you down when you start to be a pain in the butt?
Simon:
I want to be a pain in the butt for a while, I like really being annoying.
Darren:
So you’ll hold out until they offer you a ridiculous amount of money?
Simon:
Yeah. Look, it’s always nice to think about that type of scenario but I just love this game and it’s pretty cool, I’m pretty happy with it. It’s become my little, like you said, pet project and I’m happy with it and I want to see it get the results I think it can get.
Darren:
So what’s the general reaction when you’ve been talking to agencies and advertisers or mainly working with publishers?
Simon:
So my focus so far since I’ve sort of came up with the idea has been building a supply source and building the technology. I’ve just started talking to some demand agency partners, people that I know, and they’re very supportive, they really like the offering we’re proposing.
I get a lot of, “I can’t understand why somebody hasn’t done this before”. I’ve actually had two or three relatively senior agency people go, “One, do you have good life insurance” and then they said, “I don’t understand why this hasn’t been done before?” And I don’t either! Like, it’s not rocket science, it’s just a more efficient way to do things and an honest way to do it.
Darren:
Look, Simon, we’ve run out of time but this has been great catching up and I wish you all the best with Viztrade.
Simon:
Thank you.
Darren:
Before we go, you mentioned that Viztrade’s charging a, what was it, seven percent?
Simon:
Twelve, twelve and a half. Seven and a half to twelve and a half.
Darren:
So, what do you reckon the other programmatic trading desks are making on their clients’ investment at the moment?
Ideal for marketers, advertisers, media and commercial communications professionals, Managing Marketing is a podcast hosted by Darren Woolley. Find all the episodes here