Adgully Exclusive | We bring 12 years of expertise in the field of affiliate marketing to India: OMG India's Bharat Malik

The mandate of India office is to ensure clients enjoy innovative performance-based advertising technology and affiliate network in Asian markets.

Founded in 2001, OMG now has a turnover in excess of £20m, with satellite offices in Europe and Asia. OMG India started its operation in early 2011. OMG believe in doing deep research for providing the best possible solutions for their clients and combining them with best practiced strategies to achieve most of it. They have a dedicated team for extensive affiliate recruitment and account manager for every client to deliver the best.

Divided into three business units, OMG, focuses on delivering online marketing on a pay-for-performance basis: OMG Affiliate (affiliate marketing), OMG Rewards (referral and incentive marketing), and OMG Compare (monetized and compliant comparison content).

Adgully caught up with the man behind the India edition, Bharat Malik, CEO, OMG India. Malik is quick to point out that India has a huge market potential and no wonder companies like OMG are investing in here.

"OMG is one of the largest affiliated networks in UK. We specialize in performance based marketing. We add values by giving definite return of the investment to the merchants we have on board.

"Now after seeing the Indian digital marketing shaping up we thought of launching ourselves in India. It's a UK based company launched in India. It is a year old company in India. Apart from adding affiliated marketing channel to all the clients we gave retargeting and all others which are our USPs in the UK market," he explains.

What OMG does is it also brings 12 years of expertise in the field of affiliate marketing to India. The trade mark technology and brilliant team to ensure that the highest quality of service is to be delivered to its clients.

One of the biggest networks of the bank in Europe, OMG has some big names in their clientele list such as HSBC, RBS, Barcleys, British Gas, Euro star.

"Technology plays an important role in terms of tracking the transactions that are happening on our platform and we have our own platform which authorized by financial services which is called FSA, Financial Services Authority, in UK which enables us to use this platform for integrating bank clients with us," he highlights.

So after roaring success in UK, OMG now aims to replicate the same in India. "We launched in India with a motive to give a trust worthy platform to the merchants here as it was not there. We are also planning to add new functionality in the Indian market.

"A year back nobody knew what re-targeting is all about but now everybody is talking about it, so telling us about how retargeting can add values to the customers, Malik says.

So what is re-targeting? "Re-targeting means targeting the customers who have bounced out from your website and giving them the best customized offers, which the customer was searching on your website when he/she bounced off and so re-targeting might get that customer back in your kitty so obviously it would add value to the customers," Malik explains.

Some of the Indian clients in their roster are Jet Airways, Yatra.com, Cleartrip.com and Flipkart.com and Internationally Euro star, Barclays, RBS, HSBC, O2, Santander, British Gas, ASDA Insurance etc.

The only challenge with re-targeting, however, is the scale that it brings on board. Speaking about how OMG functions, "We are a network and not an agency. We are a network that works on two fronts, one at the merchant level and second at the publisher level. There is no ad-networking that is adding value but the ad-network is just getting that publisher and getting the CPMs done and though our work is to work very closely with publishers so as to deliver sales because we are CPA based and are not delivering CPMs and CPCs."

"We work for both the ends, merchants and publisher's and we have a very good team catering to that. We promise things like the brand protection and reach that a affiliated channel can bring on board for the merchant," Malik says.

When quizzed about the category of the publishers that OMG would be working with, Malik reveals, "We actually do compliance audit on our website on the publishers side and there are different types of publishers like SCOs who have niche websites and are generating organic traffic, then there are PPC affiliate, smartest digital marketers ever, who are bidding on merchants are giving them best ROIs and also we bring international experience on board."

As far as the expected growth rate is concerned, Malik believes OMG will adopt a bullish strategy.

"We are very bullish. We do have applications for mobile, but now the India market is not fully aware about affiliate marketing. We don't want to stay away with it, we have the technology in UK but we are waiting for that space here very closely. Because it's kind of plug and play scenario for us, we are there in UK we just have to bring it here. Once we get the audience/mass will definitely explore here," he explains on asking about their strategy on being present on the Mobile platform.