TechBytes with Anna Kuzmenko, COO at Fiksu DSP

Tell us about your journey in technology. What inspired you to join Fiksu?

I guess I’m always looking for that next challenge. I started out as a Content Writer at an international product company, but, over the years, I’ve held varied positions, mainly having to do with product development. My key responsibilities were to manage projects, as well as to ensure their sustainable growth by promoting them in the US, Latin America, and other markets. It was always an exciting journey of working side by side with Developers, Designers, Marketing teams and a great number of other specialists building up Product value.

However, about two years ago, I got the feel that I wanted to work with something new. The AdTech market was an easy choice: it was something I had a general idea about, but at the same time I wanted to dive into it to deepen my knowledge. And that’s how my journey with Fiksu began.

I must confess, it’s a great place to be. On one side, it’s a company with many years of experience, but at the same time, it stays agile and dynamic. Within the last three years, the company has transformed a lot and achieved impressive results. Plus, one of the key reasons why I decided to join Fiksu was the team. Fiksu has managed to gather high-level professionals that keep the company growing and demonstrate outstanding results.

What is Fiksu? How is it different from other platforms?

Simply put, Fiksu is a demand-side platform aimed at achieving Marketing goals. When it was first created, its main task was to shift the focus of DSPs from trying to make the maximum profit for themselves to solving client challenges. Today, I am proud to say I’m happy about our past record. We have already executed thousands of successful campaigns for brands, agencies, and app advertisers worldwide. Fiksu has built some truly impressive insights from working with small companies to large-scale businesses, including Amazon, Disney, Coca-Cola, Dunkin’ Donuts and others.

Fiksu DSP is integrated with premium global inventories, offering some great capability on major ad exchanges. With our tools, leading brand advertisers adopt Real-Time Bidding (RTB) as a successful method of campaign delivery.

Our continued work powered by extensive expertise and industry innovations allows us to push forward effective Marketing solutions. For example, now we’re offering ads on Connected TV. CTV is where audiences are moving to, and our DSP allows brands to deliver their messages in the best manner possible. As of now, Fiksu DSP provides access to billions of daily impressions across Mobile, Video and CTV environments.

So, if I had to single out one key difference that sets us apart from other DSPs, I would say it’s the dedication to leveraging all our powerful assets to stay dynamic for our clients.

What different technologies do you use at Fiksu?

We understand that marketers are overwhelmed with their workload. To make things easier for them, our task at Fiksu is to provide Marketing technologies and tools that involve considerable technological complexity, while remaining easy to use. We offer our clients powerful optimization and segmentation instruments.

One of the tools that empower the execution of brands’ Digital Marketing strategies is retargeting. It is still one of the most effective ways to reach out to clients that already know the brand and are close to making a purchase. As a result, the customer lifetime value (LTV) grows, while the user acquisition cost – lowers. With retargeting, our clients can also promote their new products to existing users across different platforms.

Could you tell us more about the high-performance lookalike modeling?

Lookalike modeling refers to reaching out to prospects that have common traits with a selected group of users. This way of advertising is one of the most effective means that spend your Marketing budget effectively. It takes 3 steps to create a lookalike audience.

– First, we select a group of ideal users. This could be your existing customers or your most loyal customers or even users selected by some complex criteria. In most cases, we do not even need to know these criteria. What we definitely need are the identifiers of selected users.

– Second, we use our extensive internal database to find information about past behaviors of these selected users. We use state of the art Machine Learning approaches to determine what characteristics they all have in common. The achieved lookalike model is able to calculate a score for any user from our database. The score is a qualitative measure of how similar this particular user is to the group of selected users.

– Third, we go through our extensive database and rank all known users from the most to the least similar. The top of this list is more likely to become your clients.

Once businesses know their lookalike audience, they could next decide on the budget and the objective of Marketing campaigns that target these audiences.

How can professionals leverage Fiksu’s data for their real-time bidding campaigns?

You see, every company has some lapsed users, and unfortunately, many marketers struggle to re-engage them. This is how Fiksu comes in handy. We help companies leverage their first-party data to reach out to non-active users and motivate them to perform desired actions. It’s achieved by integrating both first and third-party audience data. Such integration allows brands to target users granularly across mobile and CTV.

How do you deal with data privacy and GDPR?

Since the very first day of GDPR, Fiksu DSP has been complying with all regulatory requirements. We’re constantly undertaking the steps necessary to ensure that our platform, clients, advertising partners, agents, and contractors uphold the provisions of GDPR.

But it’s not only GDPR that Fiksu complies with. We also have implemented all the necessary measures to ensure full compliance with CCPA. Moreover, as a member of the Privacy Shield framework, Fiksu DSP ensures the ultimate level of protection for data transmitted to and from the EU. User privacy has always been our topmost priority, GDPR and CCPA simply enable us to formalize our commitment to privacy rights within a solid legal background.

Could you tell us about Fiksu’s self-serve DSP management?

Well, first of all, Fiksu self-serve DSP is created to provide programmatic solutions for precise advertising. These solutions enable marketers to reach new audiences and more effectively engage existing ones on mobile. Our self-serve DSP management offers premium SSP’s and access to the private marketplace (PMP). Self-serve customers can manage and oversee proprietary lookalike modeling for ongoing expanding and updating audiences.

To ensure anti-fraud protection and brand safety, Fiksu DSP uses solutions by such industry-leading systems as Pixelate.

What is your future Product roadmap?

I’m so glad you asked because the plans are pretty big. Right at the beginning of the next year, we’re introducing major updates to our platform to increase performance and guarantee even more stability for a smoother workflow of our customers. Also in the immediate future, we’re extending the pool of our clients and respected partners on Connected TV.

As a result, our existing and prospective users will be able to enjoy an even bigger range and diversity of CTV inventory, better optimization, and more effective performance. There are other projects that are currently being developed. Unfortunately, I cannot disclose all the information about them. All I can say is that this year our clients will have new DMP partners, more targeting options, and an improved traffic optimization model.

Great times are coming, so stay tuned.