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Azerion is a tech company in the media and entertainment business. Improve Digital is one of Azerion’s products. It is a leading European programmatic advertising platform, working with over 250 of the world’s top media owners. WNIP caught up with Mark de Weerd, Country Manager – NL & UK, to find out more…
Can you give us more background about your company?
Headquartered in Amsterdam, and with seven other offices based across Europe, Improve Digital’s mission is to build smart, efficient, and responsible digital businesses for its customers. Media owners use our tech and services to optimize their ad strategy and maximize revenue from their inventory.
Our scale is vast – we reach an audience of more than 600 million unique visitors, and connect with 112,000 advertisers each month.
Our local offices and local presence means we can build local partnerships, quickly adapting to local needs.
What business problem is your company addressing?
Publishers need to fund their online content. That means monetizing their ad space efficiently to maximize revenue. With our product, they can automate their online ad sales and maximize revenue through real-time advertising auctions.
One big challenge facing the industry is that, with a rising number of technologies and solutions, there have been transparency issues with hidden fees and fraudulent traffic. Improve Digital stands for 100% transparency, and offers the most granular reporting and insights into the market. There are no hidden fees. We have robust pre-bid fraud prevention. Together with our partner White Ops, we are able to block non-human traffic before an auction takes place.
What is your core product addressing this problem?
Publishers, broadcasters and other content providers want to focus on what they do best: creating content that engages their audiences. But the best content deserves to generate the best revenue. This is where Improve Digital comes in.
We offer a monetization platform for publishers to programmatically sell their online advertising inventory. They keep full control of their sales strategy and can see who is buying, so they can maximize revenue. But they can leave the technology to us, knowing they’re getting the best in the business.
Publishers get full transparency while media agencies get a secure, fraud-free marketplace. Our product is fully compatible with all sorts of publisher tech, ranging from header-bidding, client-side integrations through to pre-bid and customized server-side integrations.
Can you give some examples of publishers successfully using your solutions?
One example is the Ozone Project in the UK. Ozone Audience was established by the UK’s most trusted publishers, offering brands access to large-scale ad buying capabilities across premium, fraud-free environments. According to Comscore, Ozone Audience reaches more than 44 million UK 18+ adults, surpassing Google or Facebook. Unlike these platforms, Ozone Audience allows brands to deliver campaigns exclusively within professionally curated content-environments, including The Times, the Guardian, The Telegraph and The Mirror.
Improve Digital is the first European ad tech company added to The Ozone Project’s growing roster of approved partners for Ozone Audience.
Improve Digital works on a large scale with media owners, ranging from national newspapers, OTT platforms as well as online marketplaces like eBay.
Pricing?
The most common pricing model in our industry is a revenue share. However, Improve Digital also has the ability to work on a fixed cost basis, depending on the type of partnership.
How do you view the future?
The ad tech industry is maturing and consolidating. Many ad tech companies are being taken over or falling by the wayside because they cannot sustainably add value to the ecosystem.
Clients are continuing to emphasize transparency while individuals and regulators increase pressure on data privacy. These are the two big issues facing publishers and ad tech companies in the coming years.
These are areas where Improve Digital (and Azerion as a whole) is already strong but new solutions will make them central. Because our mission is building a cooperative ecosystem, our interests are with content users, advertisers and with publishers. This gives us great strength and depth in dealing with transparency and privacy.
Thank you.
