Leading Latin American network leverages data, technology with Right Media
In Latin America, many online services networks serve both the supply and demand sides and slug it out in a fiercely competitive market. How did Harrenmedia, one of Latin America’s leading online services networks, break out of the pack? Credit goes to innovative technology, a data-driven strategy, and a closer partnership with Right Media.
Last year, for example, Harrenmedia launched Sniper, a tool that analyzes behavioral and semantic data on the exchange to quickly create specific audience segments. Sniper’s ability to analyze Spanish-language content is unique in the Latin American market, and helps Harrenmedia place its customers’ content in the right locations for the right audiences.
A seatholder since 2008, Harrenmedia has doubled its business on RMX over the last 18 months. It’s also emerged as a leader, innovator and force to reckon with, placing over 10 billion impressions a month, attracting over 330 million unique users, and working with more than 1,000 RMX publishers.
The Right Media Blog spoke with Brian Prilick, co-founder and managing partner of Harrenmedia, about the company’s market, strategy and evolving relationship with Right Media.
Right Media Blog: How would you describe the Latin America market?
Brian Prilick: It’s a couple of years behind the U.S. and European markets. For example, online advertising can be 18-to-20% of a company’s total advertising budget in those markets. In Latin America, it’s around 2%-to-4%, but we’re growing and progressing at a very fast pace.
For instance, agencies are beginning to realize that there are more important metrics to consider than just impressions or click-through rates. We work hard to educate our customers on data-driven approaches, so they’re more willing to test them and see the results they can bring.
RMB: Harrenmedia has grown more than 100% year over year since its founding. What’s fueled that aggressive growth?
BP: First, our range of services. The Latin America market is very fragmented, so we saw the need for giving all kinds of solutions to advertisers and agencies. That’s why we bring not only display advertising, but also email, contextual, design and more. We want to offer customers a full online experience.
Second, our technology: It’s not just the typical products for advertisers and publishers, but something different than our competitors.
RMB: Tell us how you came to focus on technology.
BP: We’ve grown quickly since the start, reaching almost eight billion impressions by the end of 2008. But we knew that to keep growing that way, we needed to have a better idea of our audiences.
That’s why we focused on technology. Now we can analyze in much better detail all the users who are visiting the websites we represent. And we’ve seen the possibility of targeting campaigns in a very specific way to deliver better results to advertisers.
RMB: Is that what led you to develop Sniper?
BP: Exactly. We rely on Right Media’s server, so we’ve built technology add-ons that are important for segmenting our audience. One of them is Sniper, which we launched in March of last year.
We started out by analyzing all the information through our publishers on Right Media. We created several general segments by product categories or channels, but we saw that the best results came when we created each segment for each advertiser, or even better, for each campaign.
Since then, we’ve used Sniper to create more than 400 specific segments of audience behavior for clients such as Unilever, Proctor & Gamble, and for Ford, BMW, Kia, Hyundai, almost all our automobile clients. [Note: These segments may be available to other exchange members through Right Media’s Audience Sharing capabilities.]
We’ve seen four-fold improvements in campaign performance, backed up with much higher CPMs. Sniper has really helped us boost our sales and differentiated us from other players that were just selling traffic.
RMB: How has your relationship with Right Media evolved over the years?
BP: In the beginning, we chose Right Media because it was the best platform to get the distribution we wanted for our advertisers, and the best solution to monetize our publishers.
Our relationship has grown closer over the last 18 months, and we’re very happy about that. We’re accessing more data, testing more beta products, and getting the kind of support that’s helped our technological development.
Working with Right Media, we’re thinking longer term. Our goal was to become leaders in Latin America, and we’ve achieved that. Now we’re focused on international expansion. We see that entering markets such as Spain and Portugal can lead us deeper into the European market. We have a sales office in Miami, and we think we can expand into other regions in the U.S.
Right Media is our main platform for distribution and monetization, and it’s where are sales are being delivered. Most importantly, they’re helping us translate what we say to advertisers, publishers and other partners into actual results.
— Bob Pickard
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