It’s official: for publishers and brands, traditional banner ad campaigns simply don’t cut it anymore. With acceptable CTR figures continuing to slide, and users becoming increasingly immune to online advertising, something had to give.
UK-based startup Captify is one of those companies looking to change things round.
While the importance of real time bidding (RTB) models increases, Captify takes it one step further by being one of the primary companies to use search retargeting technology, whereby users view banner ads based on their search terms.
It’s not a brand new idea, but Captify – who took home the Young Entrepreneur of the Year prize at the GB Entrepreneur Awards last week – stand out from the pack by using their own proprietary technology.
“The out of the box solutions, the ones that are available to everyone, they’re designed to do a bit of everything,” CEO and co-founder Dominic Joseph explains to MarketingTech in a call. “It’s customisable to an extent, but not to the level we want it to be.
“You can imagine our need to target things at a keyword level, and to be able to pull that data, analyse it, all the kind of things that really impact our products. Those are the kind of bespoke feature that are just not available on the mass market.
“We break the mould in terms of technology and offer something that didn’t exist in the UK or in Europe – which was a really granular targeting technology which allows the advertisers to get a great return on their investment,” Adam Ludwin, chief visionary officer and co-founder adds.
It makes perfect sense; a client in the air travel business, for instance, could hit a series of ads for when a user searches for flights. “Ultimately we’re just trying to add value to the advertisers through good performance and great results,” Joseph adds.
Not surprisingly, this solution requires a huge amount of data to sift through, and Captify employs a team of data scientists and big data analysts to deal with it.
For Joseph, it’s a clear indication of where the industry is heading.
“Everyone is more and more aware that data is a fantastic asset for advertisers and publishers, and it’s now just a case of how well you can use it to monetise that effectively.
“To use your data effectively you do need technology, and you do need people who know what they’re doing with it. It’s very difficult to do that effectively using out of the box solutions.”
Yet the Captify CEO maintains the personal element is needed at his company. “It’s not all machines,” he notes. “It’s still run by people, it’s still managed by people, and the accounts are still very much human-led as well.”
Alongside search retargeting, another of Captify’s solutions revolves around grabbing publisher data – predominantly how users search through the site – and acting on that data to create monetisation solutions.
Joseph admits that publishers are in a “tricky position…trying to settle in to a programmatic era”, but adds there is light at the end of the tunnel.
“There’s definitely more developments enabling publishers to monetise their industry, and the exchanges are no longer just really crappy long tail stuff,” he says. “There’s a lot of high quality inventory flowing through them.
“Publishers on the whole are starting to benefit from RTB, and will be moving more and more into the space,” he adds.
For the future, Captify says, it’s all about holding down the market in Europe, with one eye cast on further expansion. With £1.2m of venture capital funding in the bank thanks to Panoramic Growth Equity back in July it’s certainly easier to plot a course, with the company hiring senior talent to guide their 40-strong employees – most of whom were trained up by scratch.
“In terms of 12 to 24 months, we’ve got a great idea of where we want to be and what markets we want to be in,” Ludwin notes. “Primarily that’s European based, but as time goes on we’ll look at further options overseas.”
Is search retargeting the future for advertising?
