Adslot targeting trading platform expansion

Interviews

Transcription of Finance News Network Interview with Adslot Limited (ASX:ADJ) Non-Executive Director, Quentin George

Lelde Smits: Hello I’m Lelde Smits for the Finance News Network and joining me from Adslot Limited (ASX:ADJ) is Non-Executive Director, Quentin George. Quentin welcome to FNN.

Quentin George: Thanks for having me.

Lelde Smits: You’ve held senior positions in some of the world’s largest media buying organisations, including Interpublic Group in the US. What do you see as some of the key change factors impacting the way media is bought and sold?

Quentin George: Well there are a couple of trends. First is that brand marketers are spending more money in digital media. The second one is how they’re buying that digital media, has changed dramatically over the last five years. More and more brand marketers and their agencies are using programmatic media buying platforms, to enable those transactions.

Lelde Smits: Building Trading Technology for buying media programmatically is a key focus of the Adslot business. What are your expectations for growth in this sector?

Quentin George: There are three key reasons why brand marketers as well as publishers, use programmatic media. The first is it’s dramatically more efficient and effective to buy and trade media programmatically. The second thing is that it gives publishers incredible amount of control over how that media is provisioned, how it’s traded and ultimately how it’s delivered. And lastly, it also unlocks an incredible amount of data inside of the enterprise, so that brand marketers continually be more relevant to their audiences.

Lelde Smits: The Company is also aiming to progress the integration between Adslot and the Symphony technology it acquired last year. How is this progressing?

Quentin George: So we’ve had the first phase in this last six months, greattraction. We’ve seen first time customers come to the platform; we’ve also seen repeat buyers come to the platform. And we think in 2015 as we go into the second phase, we’re going to see even greater eruption of the platform.

Lelde Smits: What outcomes are you targeting from integration?

Quentin George: So the tricky thing is when you try and build marketplaces, you have to nail two things very, very importantly. You have to nail the buy and supply side at the same time, and so our intention is with the second release, to get much more liquidity into the system. So that it makes the platform more powerful for both buyer and seller.

Lelde Smits: Adslot has this year tied up a number of partnerships and collaborations. What have been some of the highlights for you?

Quentin George: We’ve had interesting traction this year. Some of the highlights for me was on the supply side, we signed up Microsoft Advertising which I think is one of the larger suppliers of media in the world. And on the buy side, we’ve also partnered with a company called MediaMath. That’s one of the largest representations of real time, but itsdemand in the market.

Lelde Smits: Adslot’s two largest direct competitors were recently acquired by US Company, The Rubicon Project. How do you see this development impacting Adslot and more broadly, the industry?

Quentin George: It certainly validates the sector that we’re in, but what I’ll add is we’re in the early phases of automation. This is the first three or four years of a very long process. And so there’s going to be plenty of opportunity for multiple companies to be successful. We feel very confident in the platform that we’re building and we think it offers a superior set of inventory, and a superior set of work flow tools for clients.

Lelde Smits: Finally Quentin. What are the Company’s main priorities currently and what milestones will Adslot be aiming to reach, over the current 2015 financial year?

Quentin George: So three things, the first is we’d like to continue to build the coalition on both the supply and demand side. The second thing is that we’re aggressively trying to get a migration of our existing Symphony clients or customers, onto the new platform. Remember Symphony represents about $2 billion worth of demand. It’ll be great to see how we can deploy that across the entire platform. And then lastly, Adslot is working very aggressively to get direct relationships with brand marketers and agencies. So that’ll be our focus for the coming year.

Lelde Smits: Quentin George, thank you for the update from Adslot.

Quentin George: Thanks for having me.

Ends

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