Mad For It

DM: So Carsten, give us the Madvertise story if you would please.

CF: Sure. We started out two and a half years ago, just three tecchies and myself as co-founders. We are now 66 people, and we have offices in Berlin, London, Milan, Madrid and Barcelona. We are also represented in Zurich, and we are looking at new offices across Europe in 2012, in Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Moscow, Stockholm, Istanbul and Paris. We secured Angel Funding early on, then we secured A-round funding in May 2010 from Earlybird, and another $10m from Earlybird Blumberg Capital in a B round just last month.

DM: It’s interesting that all the office locations you mentioned there are in Europe. Do you have any plans for emerging markets?

CF: Right now we are focused on Europe. You have other networks focused on different parts of the world, but you have to ask yourself, what competitive advantage would we have over those players in those territories, so we stick to Europe, where we know our turf and we know the culture.

DM: From four people to 66 in two and a half years is impressive growth. How have you achieved it?

CF: It’s down to solid technology. We started to build own platform from day one, so we have a couple of USPs. One of the platform’s geo-targeting capabilities. We can geo-target to within 50 metres, so we can take a brand’s retail outlets and then put a 1- or 2- or 5-mile geo-fence around them and target consumers with advertising when they come within the geo-fence.

DM: Is this through mobile sites or apps or a combination of the two?

CF: It’s a combination, a roughly equal split, and across both channels, we currently deliver 1.4bn ad impressions per month across Europe. We have some big publisher clients, such as Vodafone Germany for example, for whom we sell ads on the Vodafone 360 app store. We also sell ads for Shazam, and for some other large German properties, such as Immoscout24, a property-finding app. Then we also have a large number of smaller publishers and app developers.
We also have a mobile video pre-roll product that has proved popular with beer brands like Becks, Warner movies, Finnair and Vodafone. And then our best-selling product is katappult, which offers a guaranteed Top 25 listing in any App Store category for a fixed price.

DM: And that’s a numbers game presumably? You know how many impressions you need to get the number of clicks you need to get the downloads you need to get the Top 25 position in a given category in a given country?

CF: That’s right, or the Top 10, or even the Top 3. But it’s the Top 25 that most brands want because obviously that’s one of the bookmarks you see when you go to the App Store on your iPhone. katappult really shows off the power of our real-time optimisation platform. We have an ad operations department that works on this, but there is also a huge bit of technology that does it automatically, measures the clickthrough rates and the conversions and optimises the campaign for the numbers required.

DM: And what kind of a network are you. katappult is obviously a performance play, but what about the Madvertise network in general?

CF: We are semi-blind, so we disclose some of the publishers and we also disclose the categories, so an advertiser knows that their ad will run on News, Auto or Travel sites for example, and they can see a list of the sites in question and de-select any they don’t want.

DM: But it’s CPC (cost-per-click)?

CF: Yes, though katappult is effectively CPA (cost-per-acquisition). But we are moving towards the premium end of the market, with rich media advertising, geo-targeting, and the video pre-roll solution.

DM: But you presumably don’t have any plans to abandon katappult if it is your best-selling product?

CF: In more advanced countries like the UK, we are moving towards the rich media solutions, but katappult still works very well in less advanced markets such as Germany, which is maybe a year behind the UK, and in Spain and Italy, which are 18 months behind. Overall though, we are committed to this move to more engaging, more targeted and more relevant mobile advertising.