TechBytes with Benjamin Pavanetto, Managing Director at Adludio Asia

Tell us about your role and the team/technology you handle at Adludio.

I launched Adludio’s first overseas office in 2017 out of Singapore. We now have offices across Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taipei. I act as Managing Director for the region.

We launched in the Asia Pacific three years ago with a mission to make a mark with a unique approach to Advertising. We wanted to focus on brilliant creative that is built based on how users consume content on their smartphone, in order to deliver guaranteed brand performance. It has since proven to be a great idea, and brands love our range of tactile rich media ads that are intuitive to engage with.

But technology and the ability to deliver great creative are not the only recipes for success. It may sound obvious but our team is always focused on delivering exceptional service and it surely helped establish trust with our customers.

Adludio is now a global, creative-first, interactive Advertising company defining the next generation of Mobile Advertising solutions.

We have seen a remarkable rise in the number of AdTech platforms in the last 5 years. What makes Adludio’s Ad serving technology different from others?

First, we are mobile specialists and everyone knows that mobile has a growing influence as it now accounts for more than half of our connected lives. In fact, 92% of the world’s internet users are connecting via mobile devices.

But the mobile ecosystem is packed with ads in the same form and style, and gives target audiences no memory-point but being crammed and bombarded by the density and repetitiveness.

To stand out among these ads, you either require some high-quality content, which is expensive, or engaging and exciting formats to approach your target audience.

Adludio leverages over six years of creative engagement data, proprietary creative technology, and optimization algorithm that allows us to ideate, build, and deliver advertising campaigns that generate tangible results. Even the paypoint is linked to creative performance since we charge on the first engagement on creative.

Essentially, what we do is buy the media and wrap it up with brilliant creative to drive higher return on investment for our clients. It sounds simple, but that’s the result of very hard work and years of experience and research.

COVID-19 is disrupting every business. Yet, Advertisers and Publishers are fairly deep-rooted with their strategies to continue delivering services. Tell us how you build resilience and enforce digital adoption at all steps of Marketing, Sales, and Support?

It is true that people’s mobility has been greatly reduced, especially in countries under lockdown. As a result, the Travel and Retail industries have suffered, and it’s difficult to build resilience and optimism in these conditions.

But with every crisis comes new opportunities, and 76% of internet users report spending more time on their smartphone.

Mobile was already ubiquitous in 2019, but that’s even more true in 2020. Brands that traditionally spent on conservative channels, or didn’t take the leap to digital and mobile, are now encouraged to experience, as a matter of fact, they need to if they want to keep up with their consumers and maintain contact.

Furthermore, according to this report from We Are Social, and contrary to what we could think, people don’t expect brands to stop advertising. In fact, more than half of internet users approve of brands continuing to advertise as normal despite the Coronavirus outbreak, compared to less than one in five who say they disapprove.

The reality is, maintaining our usual routines as far as possible may be a form of making sense of this lockdown. What advertisers and publishers need to do is to adopt a business continuity plan to ensure people and assets are minimally interrupted, and the business continues to run smoothly.

Hence speaking from an AdTech point of view, advertising as a creative force, is more than ever needed.

What should companies aim to achieve and deliver in the next 8-9 months?

Because the world has changed so fundamentally, businesses need to take a new look at the working environment. The fact is, we are not going back to how it used to be, certainly not in the short to medium term, so businesses need to start looking ahead and embracing new ways of working, accelerating digital change management.

In other words, bracing themselves to advance 5 years of technology and societal changes, in the next 6 months.

Hear it from the Pro: How consumer behavior and their interactions/gestures on smartphone impact ad consumption? 

The way we consume content and interact with our smartphone is fundamentally different from other media, such as watching TV passively. We constantly touch, feel, move, and swipe the screen using our sense of touch. The average user touches his smartphone thousands of times a day and those are as many opportunities for brands to engage with potential consumers if they show a bit of ingenuity and creativity.

I think brands should not overthink and just aim to connect with audiences in the easiest and most intuitive way possible. Currently, tactile interaction is an option that works, since it matches user behaviors on smartphones and will drive spontaneous interest in your brand when executed properly. It’s also proven that sensory contact enhances brand recall.

We should be enthusiastic about the upcoming 5G roll-out too, since it will open the way for more powerful and stimulating ways to connect with audiences, thanks to greater mobile data speed, in fact, a hundred times faster. However, the Advertising industry will have to step up and take this opportunity to unleash creativity to the next level in order to stay relevant and more importantly get back to playing a big role in shaping the society and people’s aspirations.

Tag person from the industry whose answers you would like to see here:

Charlie Baillie from Ampverse

Thank you, Benjamin, for sharing your insights!