It’s been nearly a year since Ad Tech operator AdRoll launched its new vision as a growth platform in Australia, supporting ambitious e-commerce brands who dare to grow. AdNews caught up with AdRoll’s VP for International Markets, Marius Smyth, who is responsible for the region, to find out how the Australian market has embraced the new focus, and what’s next for the business.
Marius Smyth is buoyant about the opportunity for AdRoll in Australia. Its reset changed its set-up in market, but it was all done with the customer in mind as Smyth explains: “In focusing on supporting digital first, performance centric brands we have absolute focus on the platform capabilities needed to help companies attract new users, grow their customer base and measure the impact of their activity. And we’ve seen the benefit of that with strong revenue growth year to date.”
In town for an event with AdRoll customers who “Dare To Grow”, Smyth highlighted some success stories over the last 12 months as proof that the new focus is resonating: “HashChing are a brilliant growth story. And like all game changing ideas they emerged off the back of a problem the founder had, couldn’t find a solution for…..so decided to create one and turn it into a business. Two years later they’re the market leader in pairing mortgage brokers with buyers. They recently came to AdRoll looking to grow their customer base. They leveraged our data assets to build a strategy to improve conversion rates and our platform capabilities to reach their audiences everywhere. And they’re seeing the benefits of that in terms of a jump in conversions.”
Although focused on new areas of growth, Smyth was quick to stress that this did not come at the expense of existing customers. “We have lots of brands that we’ve partnered with over an extended period of time. Marquee Sydney is a good example. As one of the most iconic nightclub venues in Australia they operate in a very competitive and fast moving sector. In moving to a digital first approach for their marketing, they’ve leaned in heavily on our data assets to build a strategy to attract and convert new customers, and our technology to run their campaigns and measure the impact in showing the ROI their marketing investment is delivering. They’ve achieved double digit YoY growth off the back of that and we couldn’t be happier for them.”
Smyth is at pains to praise the AdRoll Sydney Team and the work they’ve done to grow the business. JC Mignon is the AdRoll Country Manager for Australia and an AdRoll veteran having worked in the EMEA business for four years before taking up the role in Sydney. He leads a team of 10 “Rollers” in the region.
So what of the future for AdRoll and the adtech sector at large? Smyth talks about the need to move forward to hone existing platform capabilities and bring new ones to market. “Brands are increasingly looking to platforms like AdRoll to help them make sense of the marketing and advertising technology space. We access media, but offer much more than that. We bring our customers’ data together, help them learn from effective customer journeys, and orchestrate activity across channels to drive business forward. When you boil it down, customers want to know how to achieve more sales and grow their business. That’s what we deliver and what we’ll focus future product investment around.”
With the increase in direct to consumer brands in the region, AdRoll is well positioned to continue its own growth story and is in good company given the focus brands like Facebook and even Channel Nine have placed on this segment.
Smyth said brands in this segment are interesting to work with and have a similar mindset: “they’re digital native, performance focused and data driven.”
While developing its existing assets and capabilities, AdRoll will look to roll out new features such as video while going deeper on the Attribution Dashboard it offers. Smyth said: “We’re in testing at the moment for our new video product which customers are excited about, while our Attribution capabilities is a big bet for us and something we will continue to prioritise, educating customers on the need to move away from a last click focus and towards incrementality.”
Smyth said that AdRoll has effectively positioned itself and gained traction while also acknowledging there is still a lot of work to do: “Ultimately brands are looking for a partner that delivers true business impact in a way that’s easy to access, and transparent in terms of the results it delivers. And in doing that, freeing them up to focus on other areas of their business.”
We’ll watch with this story with interest.
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