We talked with Karthik Mehta, the Chief Revenue Officer of SilverPush, about the best way to get a foothold in advertising for startups, and what the future holds for startups and advertising.

India-based SilverPush, which has been in the advertising business since 2013, associates its brand with the phrase “Real Time”.

Working alongside multiple brands, SilverPush knows its way around advertisers and has been constantly adapting according to the trends of the time.

SilverPush offers solutions migrated from TV to mobile, all personalised and contextualised. Karthik Mehta, the Chief Revenue Officer of SilverPush offered e27 his knowledge on how best to leverage advertising for startups.

Advertising is crucial to take a business to a new level, but it is crucial to handle the process correctly.

Brand experience

Brand experience is all about understanding what the customers are looking for, what they are saying, and what they do. According to SilverPush, it is about understanding that every interaction with a customer matters because it is crucial for to creating a great experience.

In other words, make sure your stuff works.

In an essay by Jovan Buac, Client Director of Future Brand, Buac noted that “brand experience is as simple as the intersection between a brand’s objective and a consumer’s need”. Buac said that this helps evoke a stronger emotional connection with a given brand.

Companies need to ensure that, “the transactions are seamless and the value exchange is unquestioned.” This is something that biggest, orientated on services startups like Uber, Google, and Airbnb have achieved, Buac said.

For young companies, the first step is investing in a website.

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“For startups that are just getting started, they need to focus on strengthening their web presence,” said Mehta. Brand experience is all about having a enough of a presence that customers can quickly/easily connect with a new brand.

Mehta added that the challenges usually lie in the constricted budget, especially for bootstrapped startups.

“Web presence can be built through SEO initiatives to ultimately increase organic traffic. In addition, they can identify niche platforms/channels that are relevant to their target audience. These are especially crucial if you just started out establishing your brand,” he said.

According to Mehta, smaller companies will find significant ROI if they can succeed in building a presence on popular mass platforms.

“Startups can advertise on widely used web forums such as Reddit and Quora, which have huge and high impact web-traffic,” Mehta said.

Personalised advertising

In the study conducted by Adlucent, personalized ads shown to have a higher Click Through Rate (CTR) than their counterparts, and they reduce wasted ad spend. End consumers benefit by seeing fewer ads, and the ones they do see are geared towards their needs and interests at the time.

Adlucent continued to explain what consumers want from their personalised marketing while still flirting with the acceptable boundaries of privacy.

The respondents — 71 per cent of them — said that relevance is crucial. They would prefer ads that are tailored to their personalised interests and shopping habits.

As for the benefits of personalisation, the respondents mentioned that it helps reducing irrelevant advertising, helping them in discovering new products, and making online searching and shopping faster and easier.

An unknown brand, Adlucent noted, also got twice as many clicks if it serves targeted audiences with a personalised ads. 87 per cent of consumers believes personalized advertising means unique content, based on their previous purchases or shopping behavior that is delivered at a time when they are looking to buy a product.

44 per cent of the respondents were willing to share their name, email address, or product preference to improve their advertising experience. Consumers are willing to give up certain information to avoid irrelevant advertising but there are limitations. Only 3 per cent would provide their home address.

Mehta explained personalised advertising as, “serving ads based on interest and unique attributes of the individual consumer, as compared to mass level targeting”.

“Compared to generic targeting, startups can leverage personalised ads to reach target customers better. For example, startups can target PUBG users instead of targeting general mobile gaming platforms,” he explained.

The basic, digital-based way of advertising has been highly personalised. Instagram would be an example of the personalised ads, in which the slightest engagement of a certain topic or interest will result in multiple products popping up in the user’s feed.

Personalised ads rely heavily on personalised content, which require the startup to know the target audience and what kind of branding and messaging that will convert into paying customers. It challenges the startup to think of a message that will both single it out from competitors and tailor to what the audience expects to find.

Contextual advertising

Personalised ads arguably work best when paired with the recently popular contextualised ads. Context ads work by scanning a given website and then delivering ads from third-party companies based on that site. For example, if someone is reading an article on e27, the banners at the top may be advertising blockchain companies or other tech events.

In 2018, context-based ads rose to become the freshest approach in digital ads.

Most consumers tend to ignore ads when visiting a web page and contextual ads are a way to pique their interest. They allow popup ads to be more effective by delivering advertisements that are “directly correlated with the content the consumer is enjoying”, as stated Martech Series’ post by Dan King.

Consistency to deliver an experience and not just an ad for the sake of marketing can be hard to achieve. Not to mention the delivery of organic scale-up.

It is all about paying attention and highlighting the context. According to Adweek, 93 per cent consumers prefer businesses that share new information-loaded content because it is more memorable.

This allows businesses to still sell without being clickbait-y, especially with technology such as Artificial Intelligence and machine learning that give more control over the expected outcome of an advertisement.

“With the emergence of new technologies such as context detection for video content, personalised ads have changed from a page and audience level targeting to contextual level targeting based on the content being consumed,” said Mehta.

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Take MIRRORS for example. It is SilverPush’s product that uses Artificial Intelligence coupled with computer vision to detect the context in video content. It then serves as an In-Video Ads based on what it finds in these videos. The technology can tell if the viewer is watching a sports video and then serve them advertising for new trainers (theoretically).

Remember, timing is crucial in contextualised ads, it needs to complement the whole digital experience. Ads the interject themselves in the action frustrate customers, but if the ad comes at the end of a natural break, it can act as a moment for the viewer to take a mental break and thus be more open-minded to the messaging being displayed.

The future of startups in advertising

Mehta underlined that, for startups, video consumption will dominate the future of digital advertising.

“Factors such as the growth of video consumption will create a need for advertorial innovations in video to be developed,” said Mehta.

Mehta added that Innovations and strategies catering to cross-media advertising will be crucial to boost brand connect.

“Ad trends are aligning to the growing impact of AI in advertising and in advertising technology.
In some highly developed markets, owing to the dominance of digital media, print advertising might become totally obsolete.”

“Advertising aligned with developments such as voice search & Internet of Things will become important, especially with the imminent roll out of 5G over the next couple of years in most countries. We see start-ups being the source of this innovation,” he said.

The trends in smartphone usage and digital media consumption will force emerging companies to shift focus on ad solutions catering to a cross-device experience, rather than focusing solely on one medium.

In terms of the advertisers, Mehta highlighted that media planning and buying is shifting towards programmatic buying compared to manual processes, which were still the norm until about 3-4 years ago.

“In comparison to keyword, text and SEO based content being the sole source of targeting, visual information and data based insights (user behaviour) are becoming the guiding force for ad targeting,” said Mehta.

As for startups, Mehta recommended that they should identify the core target customers first, and then plan an effective digital strategy that takes A/B testing into consideration.

“With a mobile first approach, early stage advertising planning can work wonders,” he said.

When asked what’s the basic mistake many advertisers still make, Mehta mentioned the often neglected mobile oriented approach to media platforms.

“Advertisers also often miss UTM trackers to ad links and Google Analytics integration (for user behaviour) with campaigns. Finally, campaign optimisation based on data insights are being ignored which results in advertisers not effectively reaching the right audience,” he concluded.
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Photo by Jonalyn San Diego on Unsplash

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