'Pakistan, India among fastest growing online advertising markets,' CEO, Effective Measure

BR Research: What does Effective Measure do?
Richard Webb: We founded the business on the premise that advertising is really about getting the right message in front of the right person at the right time on the right device; and to provide a platform that is open to the entire community so that everyone can have access to a very transparent environment. We've built the technology in the cloud and it is very sophisticated and yet easy to use.
It is a profiling engine which measures audiences. It fulfils the traditional roles of audience analysis which are some assessment of what kind of people view what kind of content. The beautiful opportunity with the internet is that for the first time ever we have the ability with a back channel of media to analyse audiences at the census level as opposed to the statistically sampled levels. In doing so, by capturing a lot of their metrices, we can monitor their behaviour and the content they look at in the context that they look at it in. And from that, we can deduce psychographically any intention to make a purchase. We capture 152 attributes per device or person that we track.
BRR: How is the augmented transparency of the environment helpful? How is your data helpful to publishers and advertisers?
RW: The publisher, the advertising agency and the advertiser all win. Two things happen: inefficiencies of what would have been an opaque system are removed from the system so everybody grows. Also, there's a level of trust associated with the numbers, the growth and knowing what's going on - which means that advertisers will be more inclined to invest advertising budgets in digital media as opposed to any other medium of advertising.
We collect, lets say, 20 million internet users in Pakistan and we watch what they do. A publisher could run a survey on own site and understand what users do on their site, but we monitor multiple sites at the census level for several publishers. We have that network effect on every site in giving publishers the rich insight on what everyone's doing and when they come to your site you can then use that vast array of information. So the benefit to the publisher is that by understanding their audience in such granularity, they can easily develop a response to a brief from Laureal, or Coca Cola, or Unilever that may want to target a certain part of their market. And we've seen most publishers that have used our tool see their advertising revenue grow three to five-fold in just a couple of years.
You may have an obscure corner of your site that only a handful of people go to. One of those people may be in the market to buy a $140,000 Audi. You can sell that little bit of advertising to Audi, which you may not historically have been able to sell. So that's the beauty of our tool for a publisher.
To an advertising agency, it gives a rich insight of where the right consumers are in the market. If they're representing a particular brand, they can target a campaign across many publishers and more effectively buy media. After the campaign is run, the advertiser can use our tool for a post-campaign evaluation. They can evaluate if their target market saw the campaign and if the viewers recall the advertisement. So we can tell you, quantitatively, how many people saw the campaign and qualitatively, how many people remember the campaign.
So that's our model, we basically are an open plan information source. By virtue of this we somewhat become the auditor of the market by bringing a singular version of the truth to the offering. Every publisher learns something with our tool and gains more insight. The most interesting thing they learn is what are their audiences doing when they're not on the site. They could be doing anything and publishers don't really know that. With more information, publishers can more effectively sell their space. For instance, there is a car trading site in Australia - because they have rich information on people wanting to buy a car, they have conventionally sold advertising to Ford, Audi and BMW.
But because they are now using Effective Measure, they find that some of their members are interested in buying a two million-dollar house. Architects now want to know who those people are so it expands their advertising base, more people can advertise with the car trading site because they now have a better understanding of what their users are doing outside of visiting their site.
BRR: What, in your view and experience, will stimulate the digital media industry in Pakistan where current internet usage is fairly limited?
RW: Pakistan has a wide-spread landline based broadband network and 3G is on its way. That is enough, in terms of network spread, to kick the digital media business into high gear. Second is the cost of devices that connect to the internet. Internet adoption is limited by the tariffs and import constraints imposed by governments on tablets, smartphones and other internet-enabled devices. That's not really an issue here - in Pakistan, the regime is beautiful in terms of the fact that such limitations don't exist. The lower the cost of the device, the higher the rate of internet adoption.
These are the primary building blocks. After this comes the mindset: there will always be some people that will be innovative and will lead with an example. That case study of sales improving as a result of the use of this tool triggers the tipping point.
If all of these things happen right, the tipping point is reached. It starts out slow and bubbles along - Pakistan is currently spending 1.5-2 percent of advertising spend on digital media - then within a couple of years you shoot up to 40 percent of total spending. Pakistan and India are the fastest growing online advertising markets in the world at an expected compound growth of almost 52 percent a year.
The potential is massive. We've seen this happen in other markets before and we can, to some degree, predict how it will happen in Pakistan. Based on my experience, the adoption will happen here in a smooth fashion. The later adoption means that Pakistan won't suffer any of the headaches of mistakes made along the way.
Publishers have already told us personally that our involvement helps them sell better and helps them fight for market share and advertising dollars. The spread of that message will build the necessary mindset. The singular version of the truth matters - everyone sees the same data. The transparency has been positive. And it has allowed for expansion to the Middle East, North Africa and Saudi Arabia. Pakistan is now in connection with the rest of the world as far as buying media is concerned. We're on an international standard. We're moving there.
BRR: What kind of data analytics procedures do you use?
RW: Behavioural context, psychographics and demographics all come together in our data analysis. Part of the data we collect is in an opt-in environment where we ask questions and respondents may choose to answer them or not. We know that survey responses may not always be entirely true, but with our algorithms we are now able to correlate what they've told us about themselves to their behaviour to draw conclusions about the validity of responses.
Context is important. You are more likely to absorb and engage with a personal banking advertisement if you are reading a finance story. We realise that it is more effective when the ad is already resonating with the individual. Personal banking ads may not work on a dating website.
As for psychographics and purchase intent, if people are visiting, for example, an automotive site over a continuum of time, their frequency increases up until the point that they make the purchase. We have actually refined our algorithms such that we can predict when they will make the purchase within an error margin of two weeks, and within $10,000 on how much they will spend on that car. BRR: What ethical and legal frameworks do you follow to ensure that the privacy of individuals is respected during the data analysis process?
RW: Our business doesn't exist if we contravene a law or our data is at all corrupt. We seek the toughest laws in the world on privacy and as a global company we follow those laws uniformly. Currently, the toughest laws are in the European Union. They are most concerned with privacy. We sit on committees in Europe and we work closely with them. We are also a member of ESOMAR and we abide by their standards and policies.
We don't personally identify anybody, we don't know its you. If you've answered a question, we may know that the user is a male who lives in Karachi. We are also part of the World Wide Web Consortium. People should have the ability to opt out of cookies and all browsers are equipped for that. We believe that as long as we don't identify people personally while simultaneously giving them a relevant experience is a good thing. And finally, ABC in London and MRC in New York periodically audit us. The results are published so that they are available to the industry.