Adgully Exclusive | A global company with a local approach: ADTECH's Michael Sturm

Technology in all spheres is spearheading in various facets. India is at a strategic point, where higher and better technology is being implemented in all marketing activities. Advertisers are a happier lot, when now they can evaluate and see the effect of their work. In this era of digital marketing, it is essential that countries like India adopt and adapt to the changing times and effectively use the resources.

In an exclusive interview with Adgully, Michael Sturm, Adserver Consultant, ADTECH, spoke at length about the Indian market expectations and environment.

ADTECH, a leading provider of ad serving technology and part of AOL Advertising, provides publishers, agencies and ad networks the ability to evaluate online advertising campaigns. This includes even display, video and mobile formats.

Speaking on India related plans, Sturm said, "Our approach is that we are a global company but has a local approach. One of the most things is that you have to learn to understand how the market works and need to fit the product to the specific needs of a market. Therefore you need local people in your team and of course then you need to support people out of a local base. We want to build up local teams and support here in India."

"We have a policy that we open up two new markets every year. Indian market is our priority this year, besides Turkey. Last year we opened up a market in the Middle East. After which we take a look of how much is the potential in the market, what kind of competition will be there, how much online spending and see the pricing and so on. So now we will concentrate on India and then June onwards, it will be Turkish market," he explained further.

ADTECH wants to be a market leader in the Indian market. "We want to set up offices in Mumbai, Delhi or Bangalore or Chennai. We need to build up a team here. We still need to decide," he added.

According to Sturm, the market experience in India is beginning to increase. They had problems in devising an appropriate pricing system as the prices in India were too low for their high quality products. This he claims could be due to the standard of living. "Our main target groups are the premium publishers. Therefore pricing won't be an issue. We could be a little too early in this market, because of our different offerings. However being early is not a bad thing because we could teach the market," Sturm said. Sturm further shared that the Indian market hasn't grown as fast as it was expected to grow in the international scenario.

However Sturm also feels that ADTECH has an advantage as they are the only ones offering a range of services to their clients. "As we are one of the leading ad service solutions in the world and we are the only one who is offering a big range of services, people really love that they can have one partner for all their specific needs. We have display solutions, mobile solutions, video ad solutions and the like this is all within one log in. This is a big advantage we have in the market," he added.

He further said, "Since in the first glance, it may look complicated, we offer free testing phase up to three or four months. We want people to test and get familiar with our system."

Sturm is expecting internet through mobile to be a huge potential in this market and also sees the India market growing in a big way.

Once advertisers can evaluate their work in specific domains, it would be easy to provide more enhanced work in the future. Technology is a key partner in India's growth to success. | By Janees Antoo [janees(at)adgully.com]