Providing the Support to Tackle New Challenges – Q&A with Frederic Liow, AlgoriX

by Grace Dillon on 6th Dec 2022 in News

After receiving the award for Best Client Services Team at The Wires 2022, AlgoriX's SVP revenue and growth strategy Frederic Liow spoke to ExchangeWire to elaborate on the work behind the win and share what publishers and advertisers are focusing on as they seek success in an ever-changing business landscape.

Congratulations on the win! Can you tell us a bit more about the recent work your Client Services have done that won them the award and the elements required to build a winning Client Services team?

Thank you! We’re delighted to have our work recognised not only by ExchangeWire but also by our equally esteemed peers in the industry.

Since AlgoriX was established, our client services team has been at the heart of our company’s success. Through their tireless efforts, we’ve expanded our global roster of clients by 70% since 2020, which contributed to triple-digit year-on-year revenue growth. They have also grown our key client accounts by 20-50% year-on-year annually and, by industry standards, maintained a comparatively high client retention rate. All these prove the team’s ability to deliver results that are above and beyond our clients’ expectations.

We believe that aligning with industry best practices and standards is a key element to building a strong client services team. That’s why we joined IAB Tech Lab to always keep abreast of the latest policies, standards, and data privacy regulations in different regions, while working with MRC accredited partners to ensure a clean and transparent marketplace. Internally, we also empower and encourage each member of our team to fully understand the ins and outs of the industry. This way, they’re well-equipped to guide our clients and their businesses towards success.

Moreover, having a good grasp of local and regional markets is essential. Our clients expect us to not only help them grow their business but also to share local and regional market trends, competitive analyses, government regulations, and other factors which might impact their business.

In a nutshell, our approach to customer success is to view our team not just as a vendor to our clients, but instead, serve as their business partner and consultant. When our partners work with AlgoriX, we make an effort to understand every aspect of their business, including their competitors, so that we can seamlessly work together to accomplish their goals and achieve mutual growth.

What solutions do the team offer to help AlgoriX’s clients meet their goals and achieve success?

AlgoriX has three core products, which serve the needs of publishers, buyers, and advertisers. AlgoriX Exchange is a programmatic ad exchange that delivers monetisation and advertising success; AlgoriX Studios is our app development and mobile games publishing arm; and AlgoriX Entregar helps advertisers acquire new customers and get consistently high ROIs.

Backed by our proprietary AI algorithm, our platform automates the optimisation for both advertisers and publishers. This allows our dedicated account managers to better service our clients by offering proactive advice, timely industry insights, and real-time troubleshooting. By skillfully leveraging advanced technology and personalised service, AlgoriX enables publishers and advertisers to achieve the best possible yield for their inventory and the best possible campaign delivery and performance, respectively.

Are there any common areas of focus you’ve seen amongst your clients recently? If so, what are they and why are they important?

Our publishers’ primary focus has always been improving monetisation efficiency and increasing yield. Publishers are constantly exploring new ad placements and formats and are willing to work with new mediation/demand sources. Currently, bigger publishers are also building their own ad platform to have more control over their proprietary inventory rather than merely relying on mediation partners to dictate what becomes of it.

Frederic Liow, SVP revenue and growth strategy, AlgoriX

Meanwhile, because of iOS’ opt-out tracking and third-party cookie blocking, our advertisers have looked for new ways to target users. In particular, there’s greater focus on the use of unique contextual signals from in-app environments. Some examples include app store categories, genres or sub-categories, demographic attributes, audience type, content, and more.

We’ve also observed an increase in ecommerce demands and the recent popularity of CTV/OTT has been a key focus towards growth among clients this year. Since CTV platforms are now working to improve targeting and measurement capabilities, there are more improvements expected in cross-channel identity and measurement in the upcoming months. We foresee further improvements being made to determine more granular level user information across these platforms.

Finally, data from our own platform shows our advertisers continuing to invest in reaching new consumers and building brand awareness despite fears of a global recession and economic uncertainty. Overall, there’s focus on diversifying media spending and improving budget efficiency by moving away from traditional media and focusing on measured channels like mobile, CTV, and OTT.

All these are important to note because they dictate where the market is heading and reflect recent ad tech trends. In turn, they inform our own business trajectory and push us to constantly innovate so that we can not only accommodate but also anticipate our customers’ needs.

What about areas of difficulty? What kinds of challenges are your clients currently facing, how widespread are they, and how are you planning to help your clients overcome these?

Massive changes in the industry — including, but not limited to, stricter privacy policies and shifts in media consumption — have created new challenges for our clients to surpass. Below are just some of the more prevalent concerns:

• Stricter privacy regulations like Apple’s ATT and Google’s blocking of third-party cookies have brought on challenges in accurate audience targeting. As mentioned, clients are looking for alternative ways to collect information about target audiences, and at the same time remain transparent and comply with new regulations. To address this, we are currently working on a data solution, which will enable our partners to tap onto our first- and third-party data for their campaigns. Last year, we also rolled out our own contextual targeting solution, providing contextual targeting parameters for our advertisers to reach their intended audience in the new ID-less era.

• Because of the complexities of local data privacy laws such as GDPR, CCPA, and LGPD, many publishers struggle to understand and therefore comply with these. However, it’s a good sign that more publishers are realising the importance of compliance and are willing to put in the time and effort. From our end, our team, together with our data protection officer, can advise them on the different requirements.

• Constant shifts in the ad tech scene, including some prominent mergers and acquisitions, have given rise to multiple walled gardens, which call for more streamlined and unified measurement solutions. In order to minimise the impact on our customers and continue providing a seamless experience, we’ve partnered with relevant industry peers and provided our clients with multiple integration methods to enable them to easily integrate with us.

• Smaller publishers often do not have a dedicated monetisation team, so they do not have the resources and time to look into optimising their inventory. This causes them to lose potential revenue. In this case, our team can step in to lend our expertise and help them maximise their yield.

• Combatting fraud and maintaining an excellent ad experience is a constant challenge for our clients. As security measures evolve, fraudulent activity has also become more complex and tricky to spot. This affects not only our clients but also overall user experience. Knowing this, we work with well-known industry Media Rating Council accredited partners to tackle malicious and fraudulent activities from both the sell and buy sides. In addition, our team also works closely with our clients to manage this on a day-to-day basis, ensuring our marketplace is clean and transparent.

What kind of support do you expect your clients to seek from you over the next 12 months or so?

Most of the required support will revolve around helping our clients handle the challenges mentioned above.

For instance, there’s a massive variety of data points available to target at present. Advertisers will need our support to optimise their campaigns and reach their KPIs. This can be done by providing information on custom audiences, inventory segments, as well as giving suggestions on targeting and sharing successful historical campaigns.

With constant changes in government policies worldwide, specifically data policies and advertising guidelines, our partners will expect us to advise them on the most updated laws and regulations pertaining to advertising and data policies in different regions. Some clients might also require our guidance to help them achieve transparency through schain and ads.txt.

Finally, since we also run our own app studio and have rich monetisation experience, our partner publishers will most likely seek our advice on floor price and ad placement strategies, advertisers’ spending trends, and insights on competitor landscapes.

What are your hopes for your Client Services team, and AlgoriX as a whole, over the next year?

Next year will be very challenging since we will probably see slower growth in overall global ad spending compared to 2022. However, we remain very optimistic and expect to see at least 30-40% growth for the company. With this in mind, we hope to roll out a series of new products and features, while accelerating our expansion in Europe. In relation to this, we also hope to attract more talents to join our Client Services team to provide local support to more regions and continue levelling up the service we currently provide to our growing list of global clients.