AdNews senior journalist Paige Murphy sat down for a chat with Krish Raja, general manager of Captify Australia to find out more about the latest entrant to the Aussie market and what 2021 has in store.
2021 can’t be an easy time to launch a new market, you must be either a sucker for punishment or pretty confident!
Ha! Well, probably a bit of both. Captify has been eyeing Australia for a while and the stars aligned on product fit and an already solid foundation. That’s mainly thanks to our great reputation in the UK filtering over here (tons of us Brits here!), and then of course our superstar agency head Maddie who laid some great foundations having worked for Captify in the UK for three years before she returned home to Australia. Maddie set the precedence for our business success over the last 18 months and proved there’s a huge appetite for our product in Australia.
So why is the product a good fit right now then?
I think the main questions media buyers are asking in the current data climate are, “why is it different?” and “why does it matter right now?”. Captify is globally the largest holder of privacy-first onsite search data, and we've also built a powerhouse semantic technology to make sense of it in real-time. So, bringing that here has made a lot of sense. We’re solving for the static nature of rule-based audience taxonomies and the lack of freshness of data in the programmatic buying space which I find technically quite cool!
Marketers know and love search data - that’s for sure - but here the idea is to have different applications; to achieve more accountability at the top of the funnel - which is why our audiences are really powerful across CTV and video.
That sounds exciting – and only a little cheesy - but was it tough to get clients on board and hire the right people when the whole world has been flipped upside down?
Quite the opposite – we’ve found that agencies and brands are really welcoming us in Australia due to what I mentioned above plus the fact that it’s a fairly clear value proposition. Given we’ve launched here at a time when a lot of people are wondering “what’s next?” for digital, the potential is huge.
I think right now publishers also need good partners to help them extract value from their search data and create a world outside of Google, so it’s a win-win.
How are you growing the team out? Is it tough to hire a whole team from scratch?
No, it’s the dream! Based on our early wins, we’ve established sales, client services and trading functions here. I’ve personally been very keen on the culture that we build and so we hire based on our core values - they guide us, and I’m lucky the entire business has a very strong focus on this. But of course, we do place equal value on technical skills, and of course our team members are masters of their chosen crafts. But if there’s anything I’m proud of it’s that we are assembling a crew of top human beings that inspire me and have strong ethics, which in the long term I think will matter more than focusing solely on technical skills – even in a data business.
Values sound warm and fuzzy, but do clients really care about them when it comes to where they spend their budgets?
100% – obviously you should pick good data and tech, but right now everyone needs to know they can trust their partners more than ever – with insights, delivery, troubleshooting and advice on how to move forward in our rapidly shifting industry. But saying that, it’s a relief for brands to be able to access a tested product that won’t need rearchitecting due to the fact that it deals with onsite data and doesn’t depend on Google. We can already show that there’s a better way to use intent data throughout the funnel, rather than re-targeting the hell out of people.
So, you’ll survive cookieless then?
We launched here because of cookieless! We bring intent to a cookieless world and our offering will get more distinguished as a result of the upcoming changes because of our direct relationships with publishers and some clever technical executions. We’re already live globally helping brands test cookieless solutions at scale so I think now is the time to start doing that here too. 2021 is shaping up to be an exciting year!
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