Digital East
Reach Your Target Audience Seamlessly

“The secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new.”

This quote from Socrates reverberates one of the greatest lessons that the COVID-19 pandemic has taught us. In the face of adversity and the magnitude of world-changing events, businesses that are not making the right choices are far from an economic recovery.

The ones in the adtech space are no different. As the pandemic is triggering a meltdown across industries, it has aggravated the current turmoil in the adtech space, leading the advertisers to pare back their marketing expenses amid this health crisis. With the industry beset with severe challenges, a swathe of ad tech companies is witnessing massive layoffs, consolidation, and mergers and acquisitions. Adam Stark begs to differ. The founder and CEO of Digital East GmbH would rather swim against the current and opt for a realistic trade-off.

"We try and be as transparent as possible with our suppliers and our clients, with regards to the cost structure, services, capabilities, everything in between"

At a time when the market is coping with the mounting challenges associated with the pandemic, Stark and his team at Digital East are helping advertisers, and advertising agencies to unlock an untapped opportunity to embrace the power of adtech and outperform their competitors. To help customers reach the desired audience and maximise return for their investment, Digital East is bringing the power of demand-side platform (DSP)—the next-gen of ad networks— to its customers to help them successfully reach their target audience with personalised messages across all digital media. “Currently, the industry is in a very tight process of consolidating, wherein we can see smaller DSPs being acquired or merging with larger companies. Fighting this current, we have positioned Digital East uniquely as a new, efficient, user-friendly and transparent DSP that focuses on the EMEA markets,” says Stark.

Benefits Galore

Specialising in consultation, analysis and customisation, Digital East is primarily approached by enterprises that either have their media campaigns ready or need a platform to advertise or require expert assistance and guidance to help them plan and develop the creatives in the first place. “Considering the plethora of requirements that customers approach us with, we, along with our partners, can provide them with a solution that meets their specific needs,” adds Stark. As a one-stop-shop, programmatic advertising platform, Digital East aims to make programmatic advertising easily accessible to and usable by any business, small or large. Digital East leverages it AI-powered, human-driven, real-time bidding platform to offer various services from AI-driven programmatic buying, audience profiling to personalised ads through its three service modules— DE:Media, DE:Audience, and DE:AdServer. DE:Media helps users take an AI-driven approach for the programmatic purchase of ad inventory (advertising space) in real-time and optimise their strategies across various media channels, like desktop, mobile, or wearables. Working in tandem with DE:Media, DE:Audience uses modelling features to help clients quickly gather insights about the target audience as well as the ad visitors. It also allows the segmentation of audience and visualisation of patterns and clusters, thus adding more fuel to the clients’ marketing campaigns. Simultaneously, the DE:AdServer functionality of the platform takes into account the context, browsing history, device capability, and location while creating ad themes that are based on audience interest.

Our unique platform helps customers engage with their target audience through personalised ad campaigns

The in-built functionalities of the DSP can be modified according to users’ requirements. Additionally, Digital East incorporates insights from past ad campaigns into the new marketing strategies, ensuring that its clients’ ad campaigns are rich with relevant content.

The comprehensive suite of services from the boutique company has far-reaching benefits for its clients. To begin with, the intelligently-designed, high-performance algorithm powering Digital East’s real-time bidding platform allows advertisers and advertising agencies to leverage its vast array of targeting and retargeting capabilities and reach thousands of ad opportunities every second. Digital East also enables its customers to have optimised access to inventory across over 200 countries, reaching virtually any site or app of their choice and connect to all major ad exchanges. The company also manages campaigns for its clients from its platform. For greater engagement, the platform’s AI-driven response prediction for user interaction, purchase intent and creative attention intensity can be instrumental in accomplishing customer objectives.

When it comes to cutting down expenses, Digital East brings in total control for its clients, navigating them through the cost of inventory and maximising the return on ad spend. Customers are also equipped with utmost targeting flexibility in defining their target audience based on history, location, medium, demography, hyperlocal, intent, interest, income, context, OS, device and other dimensions.

Long before scaling such steep mountains for its customers, Digital East ensures that the clients get access to data that keep up with the regulatory standards and GDPR. “We create several campaigns for clients to help them better understand their target audience and also utilise the knowledge instilled in our platform to make best use of the data, without breaking any of the GDPR rules,” informs Stark.

Transparency and Simplicity: The Ultimate Differentiators

Notably, the innovative ad management capabilities of Digital East go beyond the mere synthesis of knowledge and technology. Besides challenging the prevailing norms of consolidation and encouraging advertisers to push the envelope, Digital East is squarely focused on exhibiting full transparency while dealing with customers. Organisations can have access to both standard and advanced metrics, easy to read and action-focused reporting. They can seamlessly learn how their ads are being served. “We place a high emphasis on transparency; as for me, transparency is not only important in business, it is a way of life. I have had many instances where companies wanted to integrate suppliers as network agencies. Even though we were thirsty for traffic, we declined as there was a substantial chance that we wouldn’t have been able to abide by their requirements. As a result, we try and be as transparent as possible with our suppliers and our clients, with regards to the cost structure, services, capabilities, everything in between,” explains Stark. While transparency serves as a winning differentiator for the company, Stark also credits the success of his platform to the customisation efforts that his team brings in. “We develop a very personal relationship with our clients, allowing them to deploy our user-friendly, tailor-made and flexible solutions and address their issues with ease. We accomplish this by modifying our platform, according to the specific requirements of the clients,” he adds. Unlike large companies that often impose unnecessary bureaucracy, Digital East takes pride in being a small company, well-versed in tailor-made solutions and services that meet and exceed the expectations of the clients in a transparent and straightforward manner.

For Digital East clients, these partnerships have now become a stable anchor during the ongoing pandemic. With the looming risk of economic volatility, companies want their investments to pay off in the long run. To meet this requirement, Digital East is taking every step to optimise the effectiveness of the client’s marketing campaigns while making every dime count and assuring significant ROI.

A Prosperous Road Ahead

Since its inception, Digital East has emerged as a reliable and trusted partner for its clients. Along its journey to prodigiousness, the company has scripted multiple success stories for clients with its comprehensive suite of services and highly-intuitive platform. Speaking about the cutting-edge capabilities Digital East brings to the table, Stark cites an instance when the company collaborated with an ad agency to assist them in a pre-election program. The project was focused on creating voting awareness among minorities. However, the ad agency was uncertain of its approach as it had to do so while strictly avoiding racial profiling. Also, gathering data from the national registry was restricted by the GDPR. When Digital East came into the picture, it decided to approach the challenge from a different direction. The company began analysing the varied behavioural patterns of the minorities, assessing their preferred devices, browsing habits, spoken languages, and other insights that would help them create an effective ad targeting strategy. The initial feedback from the campaign showed that Digital East was on the right track. Through Digital East’s approach, the ad agency successfully reached the target audience while maintaining strict adherence to the regulations.

"We create several campaigns for clients to help them better understand their target audience and also utilise the knowledge instilled in our platform to make best use of the data, without breaking any of the GDPR rules"

In yet another impressive feat, Digital East brought is a complaint series of campaigns for a client focusing predominantly on apps and games ads. As the client was targeting mostly emerging market like APAC, Middle East and North Africa, Digital East’s rich expertise in these regions was instrumental in achieving their objectives. “We opened traffic supply which was not available to the client earlier. As a result, the client witnessed a huge success in reaching out to the installs, and was able to promote apps developed by one of their customers and then resold to third parties after they were substantially improved by the awareness. We continue to work with this client for analysing the data that he’s giving us in order to improve the results in the future campaigns,” he adds.

Such successes have already cemented the position of Digital East as a critical provider of digital marketing solutions. A highly international company by nature with around 20 employees spread over six countries, Digital East has market dedicated teams that empower clients with the advantage of multi-culturalism, different perspectives and ways of thinking. “Digital East is like a small family, with diverse members from all over the world, and each of our members brings a wide variety of unique strengths to fuel our growth in the marketing world. Prior to the pandemic, we would conduct seminars where we converge in Hamburg and spend a week on improving the company, brainstorming, socialising and planning for the upcoming months,” states Stark.

Moving ahead, the company is poised to further strengthen its position as a fast-rising player in the digital marketing space by expanding its client base across Europe and Asia. Alongside, Digital East is also on the verge of finishing a major overhaul of its UI/UX system that will tremendously augment the functionalities of its marketing platform.