Marketing is shifting from placement to audience buying: Atul Soni

Cuberoot Technologies, an Audience Management Platform, has recently received funding of $ 0.5 million. With the fresh capital, the company plans to have a presence in Mumbai and Bengaluru so as to cater to the FMCG and e-commerce sectors. The company has tied up with publishers and advertisers, and will soon be launching the product in the Indian market.

The company also plans to expand its footprint in the APAC region, including Singapore and Dubai in the next 12-18 months. They plan to capture a substantial chunk of the market by the end of fiscal year 2016-17, accelerating their growth up to 300 per cent.

Cuberoot Technologies’ client roster includes Samsung, Paytm, Cisco, and Emirates, among others.

In conversation with Adgully, Atul Soni, Co-founder, Cuberoot Technologies, speaks about the company’s growth plans, fresh infusion of funds, data management services and more. Excerpts:

What is Cuberoot Technology all about?
Cuberoot is an audience management platform that helps organisations, including brands, advertisers, agencies, publishers, and so on, to leverage the power of data to grow their organisation at an accelerated pace. An indigenous Data Management Platform (DMP), having a reach of 10 million audience in the region, it segments the audience, enabling advertisers to reach targeted base.

How exactly have the clients been utilising this particular platform, how does it work for them?
We help advertisers and publishers understand their audience better so that they can make optimal business decisions about their marketing spends and reach out to ideal customers/ advertisers in the best possible manner. Every company has access to a lot of data from different sources, including CRM, Sales calls, Online leads, online and offline campaigns, etc. Cuberoot’s state-of-the-art platform lets them compile all of this data in one place, overlaying it with exhaustive Cuberoot data (second party data), and analyse this with advanced algorithms so that the right message/ content/ offer, which can be sent to the opted customer across every channel possible.

How has Cuberoot Technologies fared in its first year of operations in terms of revenue, work, clients, etc.?
We are moving steadily in the initial formative months and fine tuning our product by working on pilot campaigns with certain key clients. All we can say is that we have started seeing some encouraging results on what targeted advertising can bring on table for a client and add more value to his business.

We would like to refrain from commenting on our revenues right now, but all we can say is that the future looks bright for us.

Recently, Cuberoot Technologies got a funding of $0.5 million, how and where do you plan to invest it in?
The funds will assist the organisation in expanding its business across the country and shall be utilised in boosting growth parameters such as expansion of technology team, enhancing product technology, investing in better infrastructure and strategic acquisitions.

What are your expansion plans?
We shall establish ourselves firmly in the Indian market in the upcoming months. Also, the company will be incorporating bases in the Asia-Pacific market over the next 12-18 months.

Cuberoot Technologies is planning to capture a substantial chunk of the market by the end of fiscal year 2016-17, accelerating their growth up to 300 per cent. How are you planning to achieve this growth and which markets/ areas are you targeting to boost growth?
We are already getting recognition by popular exchanges and DSPs in the market, this will give marketers direct access to Cuberoot’s audience and filtered segments. We are in the process of getting our DMP integrated with the region’s leading agency trading desks as well. We intend to enter in Asia pacific markets by end of this fiscal.

Apart from audience management, what other areas you are planning to enter?
We plan to restrict ourselves to our core, that is, audience management for this year and improvise on the differentiated product offering. However, we may plan to offer our data management services to sectors beyond advertising, say healthcare, FMCG, etc., where data is critical. We intend to go into marketing automation space in the near future.

How huge is this market in terms of valuation?
The valuation is a speculative thing, but the digital ads market size is projected at approximately Rs 7,000 crore for India for 2016. Marketing is gradually shifting from placement to audience buying. A potent mix of technology and data stacks is being extensively used and not mere programmatic RTBs. Oracle’s acquisition of Bluekai (one of the best data management platforms in the world) for nearly $400 million in 2014 is also a good indicator of how high valuations can go in this segment.

Please tell us about your major client achievements in the last two months.
We recently helped an e-commerce based start-up deliver an incremental 13 per cent yield in terms of sales conversions by effectively using our product’s services. A leading MNC was able to reduce its YouTube cost per view by 40 per cent by targeting the campaign directly to movie song lovers and Bollywood movie affinity segments, which has now given us a yearly contract. We have also helped our data sources partners and publishers to increase their overall monthly yield by 15-30 per cent.