|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
Founded in 2007, MainAd has grown from its HQ in Pescara, Italy, to become a globally successful ad tech company. It focuses on performance in display ads and retargeting, and partners with top-tier brands in more than 80 countries worldwide. WNIP caught up with Piero Pavone, Co-Founder and COO of MainAd, to find out more about how it combines machine learning with programmatic advertising…
Can you tell us some background about your company?
MainAd was founded in 2007 in Pescara, Italy, by three university friends: Marco Cotumaccio, Marino Gualano and myself, when we spotted a gap in the market for a retargeting product that helped optimize advertisers’ campaigns. Since our inception, we have grown into a private global ad tech business, offering a bespoke programmatic solution to clients in over 80 countries worldwide, as well as developing our demand-side platform (DSP) technology, Logico.
What business problem is your company addressing?
Poorly created, intrusive ads continue to affect many players in the industry, including publishers, by ruining browsing and reading experiences. With 82% of readers leaving sites that feature auto-play ads, the result means higher bounce rates and lost revenue for both publishers and advertisers. Logico – MainAd’s proprietary technology – addresses this issue, which should be considered a shared responsibility between vendors, publishers, agencies, and brands alike, as it harms all parties involved.
We are committed to not only helping our clients create intelligent and engaging advertising campaigns, but also creating a more enjoyable and healthy supply chain for all, including publishers and users. Our aim is for clients to spend less while driving optimal results.
How is your core product addressing this problem?
Logico is a predictive analysis tool powered by machine learning that focuses on user, time and placement to help us analyse the traffic we buy. It improves the efficiency of programmatic advertising by using highly-informed, data-driven practices that provide response and delivery in real-time.
Thanks to its intelligent retargeting capabilities, Logico helps our customers deliver the right ad, to the right audience at the right time. So users are able to engage with dynamic ads that are highly relevant to them, and as a result, spend more time on publisher sites.
Logico is integrated with premium publishers via several main market SSPs, which prevents the redundancy of inventory and supports the transparency of bid values and fees – all contributing to MainAd’s mission of supply path optimization, and the sustainability of publisher revenue. We want clients to spend less while still driving the same optimum results.
Pricing?
We bid according to the specific needs of each client, and Logico helps to choose the best price.
What are other people doing in the space and why?
We differentiate ourselves from our competitors through our omnicompetent solution that is designed to uniquely fit each of our clients. MainAd passionately believes in the fusion of human and machine intelligence, using reinforcement learning (RL) as our unique offering. Differing from machine learning algorithms, which react to a set parameter of rules, RL algorithms work on an individual case basis. RL enables us to improve customer experiences by turning chaotic data sets into segmented audience insights and providing dynamic creative optimization.
We have a strong knowledge of DSPs, and prior to developing our bidder technology, gained extensive experience in media buying. Furthermore, we are the only demand-side player that gives insight into the won or rejected auctions, the related bid on each impression managed by Logico, and, the ad-tech fees – all of which helps provides transparency to parties involved in the programmatic exchange.
How do you view the future?
We’re always looking to develop new products that help advance our clients and the wider industry. Currently we are in beta stages for an in-app product that will help expand our clients’ reach. We’ll hopefully launch this towards the end of the year.
We also recently partnered with the Shenzhen Ecommerce Association in China. We’re hoping to expand our reach in the APAC region as well as in the US, furthering our expertise across more varied publisher platforms and advertising channels.
Looking at the future for the wider industry, the demise of the third-party cookie is a key discussion topic right now thanks to the increase of browser restrictions and tougher data regulation. We believe that advertisers and publishers alike should be prepared for a cookie-less internet.
Anything else we should know about?
MainAd are a proud supporter of the worldwide children’s charity, Terre Des Hommes. We have partnered with this global organization since the beginning, which helps to fight child poverty, child labor and forced marriages.
