European Editor Gautam Srivastava had the pleasure of sitting down with QUISMA MD, Ellie Edwards to discuss their shift from Search to Display and what their plans are for the UK and European market.
Search, Dynamic Creative , RTB, Technologies and so much more – check out Gautam’s fascinating interview below.
Ellie Edwards
QUISMA MD
Quisma was effectively started as a Search Engine Optimisation agency back in 2001. What facilitated the change to becoming a ‘Performance Marketing Agency’ and what exactly does this entail?
Ten years ago, when advertisers were starting to harness the power of the web, the focus was very much on maximising search engine listings to drive customer awareness and sales. QUISMA was a reliable partner to help brands optimise their presence online. However since then there has been an increasing economic focus on the bottom line, with marketers looking for greater return on their marketing investment alongside brand stand-out and audience acquisition.
In line with this move, Performance Marketing has grown from being a single online marketing channel, with brands only paying for leads or sales generated via advertising on third party publishers’ sites, to more recently becoming a dynamic business discipline in its own right and now being broadly used across Online channels such as Display, Affiliate, Search, Mobile and Social Media, as well as Offline media.
Viewed as a risk-free, robust and highly-effective marketing method which allows the whole delivery mechanism to be held to account, the principles of this business model can therefore be easily applied to any media and Agencies such as QUISMA have evolved to specialise in this performance-based marketing approach and are skilled in putting this pay for performance model into action, sharing the risk and ultimately delivering campaigns which are truly accountable and achieve maximum return on investment.
QUISMA was specifically launched to aid performance-focused advertisers to capitalise on this growing trend, by efficiently targeting and executing campaigns in real time, at massive scale, to the right people, at the right time, across the hardest-working channels – yet allowing advertisers the ability to measure contribution and only pay for results achieved.
Over time, it has also evolved to always provide optimum services to its clients and in addition to benefiting from enhanced campaign optimisation, including both website and ad position campaign performance, Advertisers and Publishers on the QUISMA platform can access proprietary ad server and multiple currency exchange technology, enabling them to dispose of unsold ad inventory as well as efficiently target and execute campaigns in real time.
Quisma already has an impressive track record across the European mainland – what is the reasoning behind jumping into the more mature UK market and what areas do you feel Quisma will really be adding value to?
With offices in eight different markets across mainland Europe, we took the decision to launch into the UK market because we saw an opportunity to leverage our extensive experience and pan-European footprint and offer clients all of our areas of expertise from Search and Performance-based Display to Affiliate, Dynamic Creative Optimisation and Real Time bidding via Multiple Exchanges – all of this achieved via our sophisticated real time buying, delivery and tracking technology which is truly unique in helping advertisers to really understand and optimise their entire customer journey.
We strategically chose to expand our offices across the rest of Western Europe first and then enter the most advanced and competitive market in Europe – the UK, so that we could then provide two different approaches: the chance to leverage our pan-European offering to global clients based in the UK; and provide our tried and tested service on a local level via a strong client-facing team in London.
The timing couldn’t be more perfect for a number of reasons: Marketers are still becoming much more savvy as to the ROI that Performance Marketing can deliver; the emphasis on Real Time Bidding is increasing – both in terms of the volume of impressions that are traded and the number of players now able to do it; economic pressures mean that advertisers are looking more closely at the delivery of their marketing channels; and QUISMA has the experience of working with a range of pan-European brands so we know how to meet their Performance objectives and have the technology and tools to make it work.
One of the seemingly unique selling points of Quisma is it’s Platform ‘Quisma Media Platform’ (QMP) – tell us more about the platform and what set’s it apart from the other players in the market?
To be truly adaptable and flexible in this market it’s vital to have your own technology. The QUISMA Media Platform has been built by an agency with an agency’s requirements in mind. First and foremost it’s a complete online marketing solution, integrating channels such as Display, SEA, SEO and Affiliate in one single place. It allows for multi-channel tracking and reporting, as well as the optimisation of online campaigns in real time alongside understanding and strategically using the complete customer journey.
Part of it is also a performance adserver, built with conversions in mind. The auto-adaptive optimisation algorithms predict CTR, CPA and conversion rates and deliver all campaigns based on a multi-variable analysis. This auto-optimisation allows much more granularity and better response times in the optimisation process compared to manual optimisation, with the outcome being a positive effect in both campaign performance and deployed resources. QUISMA also has a one pixel implementation meaning minimal interference on the advertisers’ sites. Finally, it is RTB enabled, calculating the most eligible campaign and bid price for every single impression, and it has inbuilt features such as a Retargeting and Dynamic Creative Optimisation tools to help advertisers not only reach their customers at the various stages of their purchasing funnel, but also increase CTR and sales.
Quisma works in the Real Time Bidding (RTB) space in Europe and now in the UK, what do you see as the challenges to pan-European trading in this arena? Is it feasible considering the different ad formats used?
A recent Whitepaper from the IDC lifted the lid on the potential of Real Time Bidding across Western Europe, and found that although RTB has attracted a lot of attention in the online advertising industry recently because of its advantages over the traditional ad exchange trading model (and over manual, direct sales of inventory as well), which translate into business opportunities and into potentially vast improvements in ROI, how quickly RTB’s market share will grow going forward is unclear.
As an online advertising technology that enables market participants to trade display advertising inventory on an ad exchange platform on an impression-by impression basis as each impression becomes available on a publisher’s site (ie, in real time), RTB enables buyers and sellers to dynamically adjust their bids as market conditions change as well as use the real time feedback to monitor overall effectiveness of an ad campaign.
As more and more ad agencies use RTB to get access to a vastly greater amount of inventory, which is also better targeted, it will create an even more transparent marketplace.
A hot topic in our industry at the moment is ‘Dynamic Creative’, how does Quisma utilise this element of digital advertising and what do you believe to be the limits to it’s potential?
Dynamic Creative is a great tool which surprisingly is still under-utilised by advertisers. It allows marketers to target their message to the right user in the right place at the right time. Overlaying data means that they can deliver tailor-made creative to users which result in high CTR’s but more importantly increased sales. The QUISMA Media Platform has a Predictive Algorithm which takes DCO one step further by looking at user intent, allowing brands to target consumers based on their product interest and propensity to purchase rather than just on the last ad seen.
Finally, what should we be looking out for from Quisma this year?
QUISMA will continue to expand both across and beyond Europe. It will be opening offices in Moscow, Istanbul, Dubai and New York this year, and will continue to invest and develop its technology, ensuring that its customers have access to the best in class agency technology infrastructure to further capitalize in the competitive area of performance marketing, across established channels like Display or Search and as well as emerging platforms such as Mobile.