With NDA’s Summer ‘Trinity Lunch’ fast approaching, we caught up with the leaders of businesses sponsoring the event. Here, we meet Amelia Parsons, Head of Publishing at Azerion UK…
New Digital Age: What are the big priorities for your organisations this year?
Amelia Parsons: Our biggest priorities this year are organic growth in key markets, notably Europe. Over the past year we’ve acquired companies such as Inskin, PubGalaxy and Sublime, helping us become the leading European digital entertainment and media platform. These acquisitions enable us to give clients access to a wider range of scalable, high yielding and impactful ads.
We also have some very exciting plans to launch Azerion in Australia, further enabling us to achieve our goal to become the world’s fastest growing digital platform and present more opportunities for creativity, product offering and talent acquisition. As well as this, we are continuing to commit to developing and launching new products to support our brilliant clients.
What are the biggest issues your clients are facing at the moment?
The biggest issues facing our clients are of course the deprecation of data and the ability to effectively target at scale without the use of third-party cookies.
However we believe the cookieless era presents plenty of new and exciting opportunities for our clients, notably by combining excellent, attention-grabbing ad creative with cookieless technology solutions.
Are your customers/partners prepared for the ‘cookieless’ marketing era?
We have our own ecosystem of media, including our own SSP and creative studio. We have made strategic partnerships with companies such as MediaMath to allow our customers access to our 17,500+ games, reaching audiences at scale. To further help our clients navigate the cookieless era, we have also partnered with cookieless solutions such as Lotame.
In this period of uncertainty, we are ensuring that our audiences trust us with their entertaining experiences, publishers trust us to monetise their sites, and advertisers trust us to deliver performance for their brands.
Are there any lingering after-effects of the pandemic still influencing your marketplace?
After the challenges faced during the pandemic, like reduced spending and staff illnesses, we’re very pleased to see the advertising industry returning to pre-pandemic levels of activity and investment.
One huge part that the pandemic has taught us is just how flexible worklife can be. This won’t be a lingering after-effect, but a permanent transition towards a hybrid work from home or office approach.
Are there any other noteworthy trends in your marketplace right now?
At Azerion, we’re seeing gaming experience a seismic shift, as it turns from household hobby to a legitimate spectator sport through the boom in esports. All of Europe’s main football leagues host annual esports tournaments, and the Commonwealth Games is trialling the Commonwealth Esports Championship this year, so we’re seeing a lot of ad spend filtering into this new format.
The gaming opportunity guarantees advertisers access to an attentive audience; a traditionally hard-won metric. Recent research by Bidstack showed that in-game ads were looked at by 95% of participants, and 2-3 times longer than standard display ads. As they appear while people are focused and engaged on their activity, they’re much more likely to generate increased awareness and ad recall.
From a personal perspective, is advertising getting better or worse?
Innovation in technology means that advertising is now more personalised, more accurate and more user friendly than ever. Thanks to GDPR, our advertising ecosystem is also underpinned by comprehensive privacy standards which protects consumer data.
The most exciting innovations in advertising reflect the industry’s shift towards attention as a key metric. Those who focus on a combination of insight, creative, tech, content, and measurement will not only gain the attention the industry craves, but also benefit from its effect on their brand and campaign performance.
Azerion is a fast-growing pan-European digital entertainment and media platform, headquartered in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Azerion’s integrated platform provides technology solutions to automate the purchase and sale of digital advertising for media buyers and sellers. Content creators, digital publishers and advertisers work with Azerion to reach millions of people across the globe that play its games and its entertainment concepts to increase engagement, loyalty and drive Ecommerce.
