Ben Plomion
One of Canada’s biggest tech startup success stories has been Chango, a programmatic buying platform founded in Toronto in 2008. Chango provides data-intensive ad targeting for Canadian and U.S. advertisers, and it calls eBay, Disney and Lego clients. Investors have been impressed most by its incredible revenue growth (an average of 4,736% over the past five years, making it the fastest-growing Canadian technology startup according to Deloitte’s 2014 Fast 50).
But many marketers will recognize Chango as much for its clever self-promotion tactics as its products. Chango’s all about educating marketers about programmatic, and it’s adopted some unusual methods to get through: it publishes a stylish quarterly magazine, distributed through partnerships with Advertising Age, Ad Week, and Marketing, and it uses creative animations to make sense of the complex buying process.
We got a chance to sit down with Ben Plomion, Chango’s vice-president of marketing, to talk about its approach to programmatic and educating the market.
Chango started out focused on retargeting, and since then it’s expanded beyond that to become a full programmatic buying platform. Is retargeting still a big part of what you do? How did that evolution come about?
When he founded the company, Chris Sukornyk’s vision was to use search intent data to deliver display ads. Four years later, the core principle hasn’t really changed, but the volume and diversity of the data we collect has.
Chango’s quarterly magazine
Intent data is very direct-response centric. It’s basically what you’re looking for at a particular point of time. Are you Googling a new pair of shoes? The majority of search terms are actually keyed in outside of Google – whether you’re going to eBay.com or Expedia or other places, you’re searching for something.
On the brand advertising side I think “affinity data” is a better way to describe what we collect. Do you have an affinity for Pepsi or Coca Cola? Have you been to their sites? Have you been looking at educational content about them from other publishers?
So today we can capture both types of data, and we can design campaigns for both direct response and brand awareness.
Do you sense any resistance from clients about using programmatic for branding campaigns?
It took some time to educate retailers on the power of programmatic to help them acquire new customers or retarget existing customers. I think that’s happening with brands today – we’re still spending a lot of time educating brands about what programmatic can and cannot do.
But I think the signals that we saw last year in the U.S. were clear – such as P&G planning to move 70-75% of its online media spend to programmatic by 2016.
We’re starting to see something similar in Canada. Clorox is one of our largest clients in Canada, and most of what we do for Clorox is brand building.
For a lot of tech companies, self-promotion is a bit of an afterthought. But you’ve gone so far as to create your own magazine for marketers and agencies. Can you tell me a bit about how Chango approaches talking to brands about programmatic?
Chango’s trade show booth
We thought the magazine would make programmatic more approachable. If you look at the magazine, at what we’re doing at trade shows, at our email marketing, we’re always trying to go back to the past and find something that people are familiar with.
When you go to tradeshows it’s all about flash, it’s all about technology and screens, the things that make you look like a real technology company. We wanted to stand out, so we designed a traditional-looking newsstand promoting our content. We took something old and made it interesting and fresh again. That’s how we approach marketing across everything we do.
I’ve often heard that marketers want more information about programmatic but they’re not necessarily getting it. Do you think agencies are taking on the goal of educating marketers?
Different agencies are doing different things, but what sticks out for me is the announcement from Publicis’s VivaKi [that it is breaking up its trading desk and sending programmatic experts to work directly with sister media agencies].
It’s basically saying, “We don’t want a handful of people to own programmatic. We want those people to educate the media agencies, and their clients as well.” I think it’s a very positive change for the industry.
Deloitte recently ranked Chango the fastest growing company in Canada over the past five years. But over that same period, public market investment in ad tech has dried up, and many smaller ad tech firms will likely be forced to consolidate. Are you concerned?
There’s no question that the ad tech industry is going to consolidate. If you look at the number of players across the industry – there are hundreds of them today – at some point some of them are going to get together or be acquired by other companies. There were a lot of acquisitions last year. You’re going to see more of this happen this year.
As such, Chango is concerned. But the number one goal right now is to keep our heads down and grow our revenue as fast as we can. We’re very lucky that growth has been amazing over the last few years _ we have cash in the bank and at this point we just want to keep growing. We’re trying not to be distracted by some of the IPOs that happened last year.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
