"Our expectations were exceeded"

 
WW: You have been present on the Swiss market since the beginning of 2014. Have your expectations been fulfilled?
Lars Hasselbach: Overachieved, in fact! We have been looking at the Swiss market from afar for years. For various reasons, we waited to enter the market. It is a relatively small market that was firmly occupied by competitors for a long time, especially Adcloud or PPN as a merger of Ringier, Tamedia and NZZ. There was also the issue of foreign currency, which was a technological challenge for us for a long time. The trigger for us to move to Switzerland after all was the end of Adcloud's business activities at the end of 2013 on the one hand and the break-up of PPN on the other. To this day, we are extremely happy with this decision because the results are really outstanding.
 
How does the Swiss market differ from the German and Austrian markets?
The unique selling point of the Swiss market is above all the attractiveness of the users that can be found there. We are involved in performance marketing here, which means that our advertising customers commission us to run campaigns with the aim of generating transactions for the advertisers. The quality of the transactions we generate on the Swiss market is simply much better than in other markets due to the creditworthiness of Swiss users. For example, we are very strong in the financial sector. The investments that are made there - as we know from our customers - are much higher in Switzerland than in other markets. This is also a very clear unique selling point compared to Germany, where this is not the case. So far, Swiss publishers have managed very well to keep CPMs high for IAB formats. This makes it fundamentally difficult for performance networks to obtain sufficient inventory. This makes it all the more important that we are able to generate very good sales for our publishers thanks to our international sales structure and algorithm.
 
In Switzerland, there is often a feeling that the digital sector is still not important enough compared to other countries. Do you agree with this?
Our expectations were exceeded. So I wouldn't say across the board that the digital sector is underdeveloped compared to other countries - although of course I don't have years of experience in assessing the Swiss market. In Austria, for example, I think the focus on the traditional media of print and TV is much stronger than it is online in Switzerland.
 
At the moment, there is a big problem in the digital sector: the shift in traffic towards mobile and the associated difficulties in monetization. How do you see this - especially in the performance sector?
I would answer that very directly: it seems to me that the pain caused by this trend is not yet too great in Switzerland. We have a very attractive mobile performance product. We have offered our publishers, with whom we are already working very successfully in the desktop area, to implement this for the mobile area as well, but to date this has failed with all publishers for various reasons. Mobile seems to me to be primarily a prioritization issue. It is obviously not yet a high priority for publishers internally or they are simply not yet strategically clear about how they want to deal with this challenge. We always get the feedback - yes, we think it's exciting - we absolutely have to do something about mobile - but when it gets more concrete, people shy away from it. Other markets are already further ahead.
 
You took over Veeseo on April 21. What does Veeseo do?
Both Ligatus and Veeseo focus on the end of articles on the major news portals. While Ligatus is primarily concerned with monetizing this placement, Veeseo's job is to keep the user on the website for longer and generate additional page impressions for the publisher by providing suitable content. How does this work? The content of an article or video is analyzed by Veeseo's speech recognition system, so the topics are known. The user is then offered other matching content from the same publisher. The system would theoretically also be able to link to external pages and offer suitable content from other websites. In Europe, however, we have not yet reached the point where this is done. In the USA, this is quite common, so that even competing websites send users back and forth to each other. This is not yet the case in Europe. We do the same with videos, which is particularly exciting because this additional video reach is extremely lucrative for publishers thanks to the excellent monetization opportunities.
 
How do you see future developments in this area?
We think that this is an area that is becoming increasingly important and will therefore be more and more competitive. And it is precisely in this area of tension between marketers such as Ligatus, content players such as Veeseo and publishers' own developments. More and more providers will push for this end-of-article placement. In my view, this is to the benefit of the customer, because competition stimulates business. We personally are now extremely well positioned thanks to the Veeseo takeover because we can now combine content offerings for editorial teams with monetization.
 
You are very optimistic about the whole area of content recommendation. In which direction will this area develop? What is being considered? What will become reality in five years' time?
For us, the focus is on using our tools to help editorial teams even more to create a better product. On the one hand, we use these recommendations to help them keep users on the site for longer. However, we also receive a lot of information about the user via these integrations. We feed this back to the editorial teams, who can then use it to improve their product. Here is a concrete example to illustrate this: as a "by-product" of this process, we tag every video and every article. We feed the keywords back to the editorial team, which are entered into the content management system and can then be used, for example, to efficiently create topic pages within the website. That is our focus for the future. That we don't just think about monetization, but want to help the publisher to build better websites. The publisher receives an additional benefit. They can control the flow of users to their website and do something good for their search engine optimization. Google loves internal links.
 
If you had one wish for your Swiss business, what would it be?
There is one major Swiss publishing house with which we have not yet worked intensively: Tamedia. But maybe that will come! The interview was conducted by telephone.
 
Interview: Pierre C. Meier 

About the person
- born 1975 in Cologne, married, 3 children
- Studied business administration in Paderborn and Cologne, graduated with a degree in business administration.
Merchant in 2001
- 2001-2005: various positions for Lycos Europe in Gütersloh,
Paris and Starnberg
- 2005-2007: Key Account Manager at T-Online AG, Darmstadt
- 2007-2009: Head of Performance Marketing at Interactive
Media CCSP GmbH, Darmstadt
- 2009-2010: Head of Online Marketing at E-Plus GmbH & Co. KG,
Düsseldorf
- since the beginning of 2011: GF Ligatus GmbH Cologne