Nick Gill Commercial Director for Marin Software, APAC on their recent launch into the Australian market. He discusses how their expansion from search into the Google Display Network, Facebook and YouTube and partnership with Criteo (retargeting) means advertisers can now manage all their biddable media including workflow, analytics and optimisation from one interface. With their success to date he highlights while this year they have opened offices in Sydney, Singapore and Paris, there are more to come.

Marin has recently moved into Australia – why Australia? What other markets is Marin servicing in the APAC region?

Marin chose to expand into Australia for primarily two reasons. One, several existing customers of ours have offices in Australia and having an “on the ground” presence allows us to better serve them. Second, Australia has a strong, growing market and an office in Australia allows us to better partner with agencies and brands in the area. In addition to Australia, Marin has an office Singapore.

Can you give an overview of Marin’s offering in Australia? Is Marin’s heritage in search now evolving into an online advertising management platform (AMP)?

As a global company, Marin offers agencies and brands in Australia the same services and commitment level afforded to other regions. We offer advertisers two options. Marin Enterprise, the company’s flagship product, addresses the needs of online marketers spending at least $100,000 per month on biddable media. Marin Professional delivers the same power and ease of use as Marin Enterprise, through an application designed for marketers spending less than $100,000 per month.

Yes, we continue to expand our services beyond just search. Currently, our platform allows marketers to manage their spend in channels beyond paid search, including the Google Display Network, Facebook, and YouTube.

Can you explain how Marin fits into the display ecosystem? Who are Marin’s biggest competitors in Australia?

Today Marin helps advertisers to manage display spend on the Google Display Network, Youtube, and Facebook, as well as biddable display media through a partnership with Criteo, a leading provider of retargeting solutions.  As with any new and emerging software, manual processes and old habits remain our sharpest competition.  Today a lot of marketers still manage their programs using spread sheets or basic tools like AdWords Editor.  While these are great tools, advertisers running larger campaigns need workflow and analytics applications to help them cut time out of their day and deliver financial lift through bid optimization.  That’s where Marin comes in.

How would the different players within the ecosystem (dsps, agency trading desks, publishers, advertisers) use Marin?

Marin is designed specifically to meet the workflow, analytics, and optimization needs of advertisers and agencies.  A typical marketers day is filled with a variety of tasks – from building a weekly report for the team, to calculating bids for tens of thousands of keywords.  As you add up the time it takes to complete all of these tasks – it often leaves very little time in the day for strategic analysis and optimization.  Marin helps advertisers to save time by automating a variety of workflows for them.  In doing so, they can focus on what matters most –growing their programs and increasing financial lift.

What is Marin’s relationship with Criteo, Facebook and Google? Are you planning to harness Linkedin and Twitter channels?

We have strong relationships with Criteo, Facebook and Google. We were the first advertising management platform to partner with Criteo and developed Marin Retargeting, which allows marketers to accurately measure and optimize their retargeting efforts within the same interface as paid search. Similarly, our integration with Facebook Ads provides advertisers a platform to target audiences, analyze performance, and optimize their Facebook advertising. And, of course, our platform is fully integrated with Google search, display and even YouTube.  We are currently evaluating a number of other social channels like Linkedin and Twitter, and how integrations there could extend our platform in the future.

How does Marin manage attribution across display, social and search? Do brand and direct response (DR) require different metrics?

Attribution is such a complex topic that it’s hard give a short answer.  We work closely with customers to understand, model, and incorporate a variety of things into our attribution models, including latency, recency, credit allocation, offline conversion, and even lifetime value.  At the heart of it, the process for modeling attribution for brand and direct advertisers is often the same, but the underlying measurement mechanisms may be very different.  For example, our DR clients will typically have a performance target to hit such as Margin or ROI, whereas a brand advertiser will often map to an engagement metric such as video views, “likes” or time on site.  Because brand ad dollars often aren’t tied to a strict revenue target, quantifying their impact can be harder.  We enjoy those kind of challenges.

Does Marin offer real-time bidding (RTB), real-time audience buying and re-targeting?

Marin doesn’t offer real-time bidding (RTB) directly through our platform, we support retargeting through Google as well as our partnership with Criteo.

Are some industry verticals more suited to Marin’s offering than others?

Not really. Companies across a wide variety of industries benefit from Marin. B2B companies, retailers, financial services, education -- all experience similar advantages in using our platform.

Can you explain the real benefits of ‘unified’ cross channel reporting for agencies and advertisers?

Reporting is really about time savings and efficiency for most people.  Providing all of your metrics within a single dashboard eliminates the time it takes to log into multiple tools and organize dashboards in a spreadsheet.  This in turn allows marketing executives to gain insight and make better decisions as the data becomes available, rather than having to wait for a weekly or monthly rollup to be generated by an analyst and emailed out to everyone.    

How does the Australian market compare to the UK and US markets in terms of general online trends and spend?

Clearly the Australian market is significantly smaller than the US in terms of expenditure, but it continues to grow rapidly – 20% year on year for FY11 according to the IAB.  With higher levels of spend comes greater focus and scrutiny.  Online marketing also continues to evolve and become more complex, so brands and agencies are looking for ways to simplify, streamline and automate campaign reporting and management to spend more time on strategy and performance optimization.

What do you see as Marin’s biggest challenges in Australia and APAC region?

Our flagship product, Marin Enterprise Edition, is designed for large scale brands and agencies spending in the region of $80,000+ per month. Purely due to the size of the market and typical advertising budgets, this product wasn’t suited to a large number of advertisers.  We recently overcome this with the launch of Marin Pro which makes Marin’s best in class technology available to a much wider range of brands and agencies.

We’re creatures of habit so getting individuals and organisations to change their work methods is often a challenge. Once we get over the first hurdle and start a trial with a client, over 97% result in long term partnerships.

What’s coming up for Marin in the next year? Product development? New markets?

Our focus is on building products that delight our customers, and providing them with the support they need to be successful.  Recently we just announced a Salesforce.com app as well as YouTube support. This year we also opened offices in Sydney, Singapore, and Paris, with more to come.  As we continue to evolve to meet the needs of our customers, more products and markets are certainly on the horizon.  We’ll check back in with you when we have an update!

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