Content referral and native advertising platform Plista has launched on Australian shores and owner GroupM is confident that it won't be long until every publisher in Australia is utilising the platform.
The WPP-owned platform was launched under the radar eight weeks ago with a team of five and is already looking to bolster operations.
Head of digital for GroupM, John Miskelly, will be overseeing operations in the initial stages of the product roll-out and while he wouldn't be drawn on the exact number of contracts that have been inked in the last few weeks he is bullish about how the product is being received in market.
“We will work with pretty much every major publisher in Australia,” Miskelly told AdNews.
“We're there or thereabouts with every major publisher in Australia so, as you can imagine, there is a lot of tyre kicking involved, that's understandable. But most of the publishers have really dug deep under Plista and found out what we do and, most importantly, don't do and they all seem pretty conformable, so we're pretty confident.”
WWP acquired Plista at the end 2013 and GroupM has been having conversations about the service with its Australian advertisers and publishers since mid-2014 regarding a roll-out of Plista.
Plista will be going head to head with Outbrain in the Australian market, with most Australian publishers already having a relationship with the US-owned operation.
Co-founder and CEO of Plista Dominik Matyka told AdNews that the reason publishers are already working with Outbrain is because Plista hasn't been in the market previously – he expects that to change.
“If you take a look at the countries where we started, where we were there first, nobody is working with Outbrain, they are working with us. It's just a question of time to when they switch because of the difference between those two products,” Matyka said.
Matyka reckons the tipping point for publishers is the fact that Plista will give them access to revenue streams they previously haven't had.
“One of the biggest differentiations is probably not just necessarily from the publisher point of view, but having some sort of recommendation widget being integrated with those websites, providing user individual content recommendations to end users.
“Whereas Outbrain makes money by linking users to third-party locations, we are trying to make sure that the publisher is able to make money through having relevant user advertisements placed in those widgets.”
Miskelly reiterated Matyka's sentiment: “Given the product suite that Dominik talks about, it's a great combination to chat to publishers about, generating revenue from streams they wouldn’t have seen before.
“Because of the capital advertising products there's a lot of money spent on ad networks, search and Facebook, where traditional publishers haven't seen that type of revenue. These are new revenues for publisher to generate revenue from.”
Since GroupM commenced conversations with advertisers and publishers around August last year there has been speculation in the market regarding how exactly Plista and GroupM have attempted to draw clients away from Outbrain. Scuttlebutt was that there might be pressure on publishers about a potential loss of advertiser spend if they didn't switch from Outbrain to Plista – speculation Miskelly was quick to refute.
“The people we talk to about Plista tend to be product people, editors, who aren’t necessarily concerned about what GroupM spends from a revenue perspective, so that sort of null and voids that point,” he said.
“Again we're trying to show publishers how to grow new revenue streams. It's not a case of beating people over the head.”
Miskelly also made clear that there would be no sharing of data between Plista and Group M's trading desk Xaxis, telling AdNews that: “There’s some scare about using Plista to fuel and power Xaxis and we actually can't, technically or legally, cross-pollinate between Plista and Xaxis. There’s nothing in that particular story,” he said.
When it comes to launch KPIs, Miskelly said he's going to keep it simple: “We just keep it pretty straightforward, bed down the team and work with existing publishers and obviously work with our GroupM clients to deliver interesting campaigns. Very simple, pretty low key,” he said.
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