Simon Larcey, after working in advertising sales in London, founding a media business chaired by Clive James and a martech platform that provided brands with a range of social media solutions and serving as business development director for Atomic 212, launched self-serve advertising platform Viztrade at the start of 2019.
Larcey said he started the business because he wanted to create a more efficient way for media owners to trade with advertisers, challenge programmatic advertising and chart out a more direct route to market that eliminated the middlemen.
“I noticed that for every dollar that was leaving the advertiser and ending up at the media owner in the programmatic ecosystem, it was being substantially diluted, and the media owner was only getting 50% or sometimes less of the revenue and the advertisers were not getting the value that they thought," Larcey said.
“We launched with a focus towards regional media, and we attracted probably 250 to 300 local titles into the marketplace. I noticed what was proving very popular was a feature that we added in the platform, called ‘Create your own landing page’ that enabled anyone in the marketplace to create a dedicated landing page with a dedicated link that they can put on their website and people could go directly to their site and buy advertising on their site directly from this link, all powered by us.”
Larcey said because of the take-up Viztrade started getting, he focused his attention on enhancing that capability, with the business now ending up as a software provider to media owners and providing them with self-serve advertising solutions.
One of those media owners who have partnered with Viztrade is REA Group, the majority-owned News Corp online housing classifieds group who Viztrade are launching an ad buying solution for.
The service, Promote, enables an advertiser to market at a hyper-local level to any of the 15,000 searchable suburbs on realestate.com.au, expanding advertising sales channels to a broader range of SMEs, cutting the ad buying process down to four steps from 12 and allowing the advertiser to load a campaign in just four minutes.
Larcey said that REA Group was interested in expanding their revenue opportunities, accessing a new type of advertiser, making it easier for smaller businesses to do business with them and making their ad inventory more accessible - and Viztrade ticked all the boxes.
“You can target down to granular suburb level - not just postcode, because you'll find that there are sometimes lots of suburbs within one postcode. It's very targeted, it's very focused and it's very easy to replicate across any other property portal,” said Larcey.
Larcey said that the key point of difference for Viztrade’s system is that anyone can put in an ad campaign and then it goes directly to that media owner’s ad server, but it's up to the media owner to approve or decline so they're in complete control.
“I know with other automated channels, quite often, bad actors get through, bad ads get through and it’s risky,” said Larcey.
“We have no risk - it is completely and utterly up to the media owner to approve. We automate the whole process from building the ads to creating the line items and orders in the ad servers.
“The media owner adops team gets an email that says there’s a new campaign - click here to see the ad, click here to see the clickthrough, click here to approve or decline. Accessibility, full control and no dilution of media spend. It's literally direct revenue and a possible new source of revenue.”
Larcey said that comparing IAB figures of total digital advertising spend in 2022, totalling $14.2 billion, and SMI figures of around $3.4 billion to $3.5 billion for the same year, means there's over $10 billion being spent in digital advertising that's not coming from agencies.
“Probably 80% of that is going towards Google and socials and slowly into Amazon now, but it's very competitive, and they're very expensive and in order to get the results that you want, you've got to bid high and pay agency type dollars,” said Larcey.
“By having other media owners offering self service solutions, just like Facebook and Google have always done, it opens up their scope for different marketing channels and it will become a lot more effective for some advertisers not to use Google and Facebook, but to use things like realestate.com.au and other big channels that are opening up their inventory and making it more accessible.”
Larcey said that the traditional media sales methods have lots of flaws and challenges, especially for SMEs.
He said the direct sales route is a cumbersome, manual process - a lot of small businesses don't want to talk to over-enthusiastic sales reps and sales reps don't want to talk to somebody that's going to spend only a couple of hundred dollars. When it comes to programmatic, Larcey said he doesn’t think any SME would know how to start using a programmatic platform, so it makes no sense for them to try and utilise such a technology.
“By introducing a platform that's very simple to use that replicates what they’re probably already doing in some way on Facebook or Google or any other social platform, then all of a sudden they have access to real media that's not populated with UGC or search results,” said Larcey.
“It’s premium quality content that's all been vetted by a media owner, it's safe, and it's hyperlocal, so it benefits those small businesses trying to promote themselves within their local community.”
Larcey said that any SME can take advantage of a self-serve advertising platform and with impending privacy regulations around first-party data and the death of cookies creeping ever closer, it makes sense to be able to place your ads where they’re going to perform best.
“This gives them choice and it just goes back to the traditional way media used to be sold, which was predominantly in a contextual environment,” Larcey said.
“I don't think that there's anything more annoying than being followed around the internet by an ad on a completely contextually irrelevant site. If I run a car garage, I'm always going to want to advertise in a car magazine. Why would I want to go anywhere else? ‘Because you can follow audiences’ – but if I don’t even know who my audience is, how is that going to help me?”
Larcey said the market has responded “very well” with regards to what Viztrade has done with REA and the company has a very strong pipeline and a lot of interest from a range of media owners.
“We're not solely focused on the SME market, but that's a huge opportunity and I would encourage every media owner to chase it, because it's an untapped market,” said Larcey.
“No one does it because it's so complex and it's so fragmented, but by just opening up your inventory and letting people know about it, you can let them come to you with some clever marketing around how you attract those SMEs.
“We're also talking to some traditional big media owners whose clients are predominantly agencies. We've got a solution called VizConnect that can be used by internal sales teams and their agency partners just to streamline the whole process.
“We're about to roll out a solution for JustAuto, which is an auto classifieds website. We're working with a regional news group in the UK. We're finalising details for an outdoor publisher in the US with multiple titles. We’re talking to some property portals in the UK and one in the US and now we've got REA as a great showcase too.”
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