Acceleration Partners’ Publisher Spotlight is an ongoing series where members of our Publisher Development team shine a light on innovative publishers from across the world.
This month, Vikki Danielson, Senior Publisher Development Manager at Acceleration Partners, chatted with Bharat Sharma, COO at Affinity Global Inc.
For those of us who haven’t heard of Affinity Global before, please give us your elevator pitch?
Affinity is a global ad tech company that creates user engagement products for branding and performance goals with the sole purpose of enhancing user experience. Affinity has five dedicated business units that provide solutions for both sides of the digital advertising industry – advertisers & publishers.
Products for Advertisers – Siteplug (Autocorrecting browsing errors), VEVE (Connecting brands with mobile phone manufacturers and browsers) and mCanvas (experiential storytelling for small screens)
Products for Publishers – Yield Solutions (custom monetization strategies for display & video) and OneDash.ai (Ad operations digital assistant for content publishers)
Please tell us more about how Affinity can help brands reach audiences across the globe?
Affinity (Siteplug & VEVE) is in the business of meeting performance goals for brands globally. This is possible due to our strategic partnerships with leading phone manufacturers (OEMs), browsers, search engines, several domain parking companies, domain owners and various related mobile & desktop applications.
Our alliances help us get access to 500mn+ global users especially from rich markets such as North America, Brazil, UK, Germany, Southeast Asia and India.
In addition to the wide & diverse reach, we are able to drive high performance for our brands due to our innovative ad formats – SiteDirect, SiteSuggest, Tiles, Notification Ads and Offers Engine.
Affinity has several integrations and product capabilities across Siteplug and VEVE. Can you tell us about them?
Siteplug & VEVE are marketing platforms that help brands achieve their performance goals such as digital sales, engagements, drive installs and content consumption in addition to other customized KPIs. We have engineered and designed five products that assist the user at various points of their online journey and enhance their overall experience with the brand.
These products and their capabilities include:
SiteDirect corrects domain typos. This helps users reach their brand destination faster by avoiding competitor ads on parked pages.
SiteSuggest smartly navigates users directly to the brand website by surpassing competitor ads on search engine results page (SERP).
Tiles, available on browsers and OEM start pages, grab the users’ attention before they plunge into their browsing experience.
Notification Ads are the ones that alert users with the latest brand offers through push notifications.
Offers Engine is an owned and operated website which promotes offers across verticals and features them on start pages on OEMs and browsers.
Siteplug is all about preventing the loss of high intent users. How are these users incremental to a brand if a user was already trying to get to the brand?
Brands lose billions of dollars due to the loss of users to competitor ads. Users are easily distracted to compelling competitor ads, especially if they end up navigating to typo domains.
In some cases, the users may also land up on malware-infested sites. Our research suggests that over 50% of users end up clicking on competitor ads and 20% of those users make a transaction with a competitor brand. Here’s where brands can use Siteplug products to ensure their high-intent users are not lost and are safely and swiftly landing on their preferred brand destination.
In some cases, brands have seen a 10% uplift in their overall digital sales. Siteplug products are built to enhance the users’ experience, especially if they make a browsing error or by simply assisting them early on in their search journey. Over time this also ensures deep brand loyalty as the user tends to get spoiled with the convenience provided by the brand.
Tell us how VEVE can give brands access to over 200 million global users with multi-device targeting getting average conversion rates of 1-3% with no tech integration?
VEVE is a performance marketing platform that connects brands with OEMs and browsers using intuitively native-looking ad formats that perform.
Owing to our varied publisher partnerships from across the globe with OEMs, browsers, telcos and multiple desktop/mobile applications, we have access to over 200 million desktop and mobile users. VEVE ad formats engage the users uniquely through their online journey and our backend algorithms have the capabilities to smartly choose the content that is exposed to the user based on their historical click/purchase pattern.
These two attributes ensure consistent and high conversion rates for our performance campaigns. Signing up on a platform is an easy two-step process. Share the tracking URL and basic creative assets such as logos and ad copies (only in case of Notification Ads and Offers Engine).
You are so confident in your abilities that you offer brands something that no other publisher does, tell us about your proposition to brands?
Confidence comes only with experience, growth and a fearless vision. In our case, we have a great product, rich global publisher partnerships and scores of advertisers who have met and exceeded their performance marketing objectives with us.
In the past five years, we have generated more than $500 million in sales for our brands and our vision is to deliver $5 billion in the coming few years.
Any brand from any vertical who is in need of high-intent or in-market users can take advantage of our platform and we will guarantee consistent conversion rates. For brands who would like to experience our platform are welcome to reach us for a free test by writing to sales@veve.com or sales@siteplug.com
Any new monetization solutions coming in 2020 from Affinity?
Yes, indeed! In this fast-changing ad tech world, we are doing our part to enhance the industry and add more value. As research and development has always been our priority, especially to identify attractive and efficient ways for brands to reach consumers, we have recently invested time into building a content monetization solution. More on this will be divulged later this year.
A large number of your team is based in Mumbai, tell us where to go and what to see if we had only 24 hours to visit.
Twenty-four hours is not enough time to get a feel of the city. However, Mumbai has something to offer to everybody at any time. A good mix of activities include a visit to Gateway of India and Taj Heritage, a walk down the Queen’s Necklace, a yacht ride in the Arabian Sea, drive through Worli SeaLink, shop at Colaba Causeway and finish the day with a chilled beer at Leopolds.
