Singapore – CtrlShift, an audience solutions company, has reorganised the business into three units – The Hub, The Studio and The Lab – with its flagship media management product, The Hub, at its core. The restructure allows the company to have a scalable, technology-led, data-sciences based approach to the market. CtrlShift will continue to offer data-driven marketing services to companies requiring a comprehensive tech-plus-services package.
The Hub is a SaaS platform used by agencies and brands to facilitate efficient media-buying at scale across multiple channels and buying ecosystems. It is expected to be the key growth driver for CtrlShift. The Studio focuses on providing audience-focused marketing solutions; offering media strategy and trading-desk services (leveraging The Hub) for marketers as well as audience segmentation consulting and sales for publishers. The Lab is the data sciences-focused research and development (R&D) unit of the company. It develops in-house technology and audience intelligence tools for The Hub and The Studio units.
Reza Behnam, Co-founder & Executive Chairman at CtrlShift, said: “The digital advertising industry is broken – it is optimised for the intermediaries at the expense of brands and publishers. On average 60 to 70 cents out of each media dollar is siphoned off before it gets to the publisher. While technology and automation have greatly enhanced our ability to target audiences in real time, the continued fragmentation and complexity of the industry have caused major inefficiency and confusion. While companies like Google and Facebook have created “pre-packaged” full stack (inclusive of DMPs, DSPs, ad servers and analytics tools) solutions to address the complexity, issues like pricing transparency and data retention remain unresolved.”
He continues, “The Hub attempts to address this by allowing brands to access and optimise campaigns across multiple technology and inventory partners simultaneously. Think of The Hub as having the ease-of-use of pre-packaged full-stack solutions, while revealing the best combination of partners for your specific objective as they compete to optimize your media dollar. Essentially, we are taking care of media-buying execution in a risk-free, transparent way so that brands can focus on strategy and planning.”
At present, The Hub is connected by API to a plethora of technology partners and inventory sources – DSPs, ad servers, data providers, exchanges and private marketplaces – giving greater visibility into the digital advertising supply chain; empowering brands to maximise returns on media investments with speed, transparency and intelligence. It is currently integrated with eight buying platforms in the open ecosystem as well as Google and Facebook, giving it access to almost 100% of automated inventory in major markets.
The platform also provides real-time updates of campaign performance with cross-channel metrics unified on a central reporting dashboard.
Ganga Chirravuri, CIO and Global Head, Platform Solutions at CtrlShift, adds: “The Hub has a recommendation feature which leverages data-science models that learn from historical campaign data to provide insights to optimise campaigns. It does this by proactively suggesting specific tactics to improve performance – which websites to whitelist, which platforms to buy through, how to allocate budgets – and by predicting the impact of choosing a certain set of inputs. Tactics recommended by The Hub have helped our traders consistently outperform client benchmarks.”
In 2017, digital advertising is expected to account for 38 per cent, or USD59 billion of ad spend in Asia Pacific. Total ad spend in the region is expected to increase by 5.6 per cent by the end of year, and is forecast to grow at 5.1 per cent in 2018.
