‘If we can make it work for a client in India, we can make it work elsewhere’

Digital marketing has been a growth engine for many companies and Entravision MediaDonuts, which claims to be a pioneer in the same, is one of them. According to the company, it has grown 100% Y-o-Y in the last three years. With barely 40 employees across Asia before the pandemic, the company has grown 3X in the two years of Covid.

exchange4media caught up with Founder-CEO Pieter-Jan de Kroon and Vidhu Sagar, Managing Director, India - Entravision MediaDonuts, to talk about the company’s future plans, unique offerings and a lot more. 

Excerpts:

What are some of the unique offerings that your digital marketing agency has for clients? How do you stand out in the cluttered market?

Pieter: We are different because we’re not really an agency. Our business started off originally as in performance marketing, to help brands and agencies with the performance of their campaigns, and using programmatic advertising solutions to help deliver that performance. We’ve developed a technology stack over the years, and that allows us to run campaigns across any channel: display, video, native, social, and in delivering any objective a client might have. That’s worked well for us.

So, in terms of services, what is different in the performance marketing you’re offering?

Pieter: First of all is the fact that we commit to KPIs that the advertisers are looking for, especially in the performance space. For example, in India, and across most of East Asia, we work a lot with fintech, edutech and gaming clients. What we do for them is drive up installs at scale but commit to objectives beyond the install, like account opening, first transactions, and in-game purchases. That’s one of the things clients really like about us: that we can commit to these KPIs across media without risk, and we complement those performance solutions we’ve provided with unique commercial partnerships with social media and entertainment platforms.

For example, in India we have representation business with the likes of Tinder, B612, and Snow, with whom we have exclusive partnerships. On a bigger scale, we represent the likes of Twitter, TikTok, Spotify and so on. We combine our performance solutions with providing our partners with unique access to inventory that is exclusive to us.

Vidhu: While we’re a digital marketing company, that term itself has come to be abused so much that you don’t know where it begins or ends. Everything has become digital from WhatsApp marketing to email marketing and so on. Our focus area has been clearly on paid media solutions. We don’t actually create anything ourselves; we have a lot of agency partners in that space. We come in from the paid media solutions perspective where we made capital of our strengths in the area of performance marketing, riding on the brilliance of programmatic from an early stage, which we’ve developed to a fairly deep level now. Beyond that, there is an inherent duality in our business.

As a crude example, let’s imagine you’re a financial services software company and are making backend software for banks. Then you get so deep into it that you set up your own bank because you know the business so well. In a very crude sense, we’ve been doing the data science behind digital marketing for so long that we decided to add the other side of the business, which is the partnerships, as well. This duality allows people to see the business from both sides.

Are most of your clients global and APAC companies, or do you also have some India-specific names?

Vidhu: We have more local businesses, but few typical network clients like most agencies. We practically have everything homegrown, and in every market we have our own portfolio of clients.

Who are your key clients in India?

Vidhu: In India, if we talk about the biddable side of the business, which is really the conventional buying and planning model, including the programmatic piece, and who we work with directly, there is Adobe in the tech space, Adda52 and Spartan Poker in the gaming space, Metropolis from the medico-pharma space, Dalmia Cements in infrastructure, as well as a lot of restaurant brands like Domino’s and Pizza Hut as a result of our Tinder association.

It’s been one year since Entravision acquired MediaDonuts. How has been the journey so far? How has this alliance helped you both grow and add value to the joint venture?

Pieter: During pre-acquisition, what we realized is that especially within the representation space, consolidation is happening globally, and as a company we had a very strong presence in SE Asia, especially in countries like Vietnam and the Philippines, and with companies like Twitter and TikTok. We were approached by several companies around the same time, and we had a lot of conversations and realized it would help us to continue to grow at the rate we were going by being part of a bigger organization that has a global presence and we can benefit from global relationships. We ended up going into conversations with Entravision, as we found a very strong connection with the management team of Entravision personally and with their vision for the future. That led to the acquisition in July last year and it’s been a great journey so far.

Entravision is originally a broadcasting company, so there’s a TV and radio division that they began in 1996, which has 50 radio and 50 TV stations targeted towards Hispanics in the US. In 2014, they started their digital transformation strategy, by acquiring digital agencies around the world. Some of their other acquisitions include 365 Digital, DataXpand, and Cisneros, the last of which has exclusive representation of brands like Facebook, Spotify, Linkedin. So, it made sense to be part of such a group as we saw a lot of synergies in what they were doing particularly in markets like the Americas. They also didn’t have a presence in the APAC region and so Media Donuts represents Entravision in this market. This allows us to continue as we were and with what we were doing, while having a strong backing of a partner and large opportunities for growth in the markets we’re already present in as well as new ones, and it’s been going pretty much according to plan.

You work with many developed markets in the West. How different is the Indian market and what is the potential you see here?

Pieter: It’s very different of course. Firstly, I think it’s very dynamic here. We have learned a lot here as India, because of its large size, has a lot of opportunities as well as a lot of challenges. There’s a lot of competition, clients are very price sensitive and they always have many options. To be successful in India, you have to have a very unique offering, excellent customer service, and it mostly all comes down to performance, whether its budget or impact or ROI. Because there is so much competition, the expectations are very high and every company wants performance. Coming from Europe, I saw we’d have to approach a lot of things like price points and expectations from a very different angle. But it’s very interesting because it means if we can make it work for a client in India, we can probably make it work for clients elsewhere. And there have been a lot of lessons we’ve learned from India that we’ve applied elsewhere.

Compared to the West, the digital market in India is still at a pretty nascent stage but is growing rapidly. So, what are the opportunities you see in that?

Pieter: There are multiple opportunities. First is the reallocation of budgets, as advertisers are moving from traditional media like TV and OOH towards digital resources. And then within the digital space itself, there are a lot of opportunities as social media is dominated by a couple of players like Facebook as well as a few local players. There’s a lot of room for diversification in the space. Advertisers are looking to reallocate budgets from just Facebook (Meta) platforms and be present on other channels.

Vidhu: India may have been behind earlier. The learning curve has been really steep. Broadly speaking, the total AdEx in India is around Rs 75,000 crore right now, and 30% of it is digital AdEx. Six-seven years ago, I remember discussing with people that the UK was the only market in which digital had seen explosive growth and overtaken TV, and now India is not too far behind. Knowing that the size of the pie in India is much larger than in the western markets, the rate at which digital has grown is simply stupendous. Some of the work done by companies like us has also contributed to that.   

Do you have specific expertise or preference when it comes to different sectors whether it's fintech, medical, luxury or any other niche?

Pieter: Not really. We look at our business in three parts. The clients we work with are very diverse, but we look at them broadly in three units: social media, which is important due to our exclusive relationships with platforms like Twitter, TikTok etc., and this category includes brand advertisers like CPGs, QSRs and large banks. The second is with mobile apps, which have very specific categories like fintech, edutech, and gaming, which are the main categories. The third pillar of our business is commerce advertising, which is in its early days right now. We’ll be announcing several new commerce advertising partnerships in the days and weeks to come. This space is growing very fast and will feature a lot of different advertisers, not just e-commerce and retail platforms, but anyone selling any product anywhere, and we want to become an established player in the space.

Where do you see yourselves five years from now?

Pieter: Everything is evolving so fast. Look at how TikTok led to innovations on Facebook and other platforms. And while social media is going to continue to be important, there’s going to be so much more innovation in the field and we want to be part of that and continue to work with new platforms. Advertiser investments are going to continue to grow in digital resources. And as I’d mentioned, commerce advertising is going to become really big in the coming years while metaverse is also a space we're watching closely. Gaming will play an increasingly important role in advertising, and we’re going to be announcing some exciting new partnerships in that segment. As a company, we'll be going really strong in the commerce advertising space and also with our performance offerings, especially in the mobile space, which we’ll be focusing more on. So, we plan to double down on these offerings, and in India there’s a lot of space and a long runway left to take off from.

Before we conclude, I am curious to know where did the name Media Donuts come from?

Pieter: We started the company 12 years ago in Belgium as a digital media performance company, at a time when there were very few players in that space. Nearly 90 per cent or more was bought on CPM, or even cost per day, or cost per month, when it came to putting a banner on a website. We were one of the first companies to offer clicks, CPC, and the few other companies in the space all had Click or Double Click or @ or something like that in their names, so all the companies got mixed up for each other. So, we decided that when we walk out of a meeting, the client should at least remember our company name. We were brainstorming ideas and my business partner and co-founder sent me an image of Randy’s Donuts, an iconic LA donut brand, which has a huge display donut on top of the store, with the signage being at least three times the size of the shop itself. So, we thought the guy must really like advertising, and plus everyone likes donuts. On a more serious note, we were doing some research and we read about the data donut, which is a system of servers of all the banking and financial services institutions in New York that are positioned around the NYSE so that they are protected from natural disasters but are also very close to the markets so as to verify transactions. And programmatic operates much in the same way as financial institutions do in their own data analytics. It all linked together and we came up with Media Donuts. So, when we first started our company with the name, we sent out 10 donut boxes with six donuts in each to different agencies and we got a call back from nine of them on the same day, thanking us for the donuts and inviting us to drop by, so clearly our donuts worked.