How Datawrkz addresses issues in online advertising space
The digital market space is growing enormously. According to the Digital Advertising in India report, the total value of the online advertising market in India was expected to increase to Rs 3,575 crore this year from Rs 2,750 crore in the year earlier. It is expected to be worth more than USD 100 billion by 2020.
However, owing to inefficiency in advertising space, smaller organisations face issues as they don’t have tools or expertise to make the most of the opportunities that online advertising offers. Launched in January 2014 by Senthil Govindan and Anand Prakash, Datawrkz is an advertisement technology provider for publishers, agencies, and brands which claims to address the persistent issue in the ecosystem. The platform is headquartered in Singapore and has a branch office in Bengaluru.
Its core competency lies in identifying relevant audience on real time. The company works with advertisers and agencies to help and achieve their online campaign goals.
To start with, the company rolled out service-based solutions that enabled advertisers and publishers. In parallel, it started working on products that make advertising technology accessible to the industry. “Vizibl is a step in this direction. It helps small advertisers leverage tools such as fraud detection and contextual targeting while also giving them far greater access to online audiences. We are working on similar tools for publishers to help them increase their monetisation potential,” says Senthil, Co-Founder and CEO, Datawrkz.
He adds that the platform believes that the bottom of the pyramid in the advertising market that is underserved. He has established both service and technology lines of business to address this segment. Advertisers can look forward to accessing a set of features that were hitherto only within the grasp of large agencies.
Revenue model
The business model of the platform revolves around facilitating programmatic buying and selling of ad impressions. Besides helping websites monetise the traffic, it also works with advertisers and agencies to help them achieve their marketing goals by driving brand awareness, traffic to their website, or direct revenue related goals.
“We work on three models – pay-as-you-go, customised approach, and long-term approach. In pay-as-you-go, a client can pre-pay for access to Vizibl, and consume those funds against media spend at their own pace. The customised approach adds a managed services layer over Vizibl. This gives a client the ability to tap into Datawrkz’s extensive experience in the digital marketing field. In long-term model, a client will get a dedicated account manager and big data insights through our technology and analytics team. This is typically more attractive for larger clients,” says Senthil.
Growth figure
Starting out with the team of three people and a seed capital of approximately Rs 50 lakh, and has grown over time to have a reserve base of close to USD 1 million.
“Our clients are global advertising agencies and publishers. We are increasingly working with startups in India.A large percentage of our revenue comes from North America, with a reasonable number from EMEA, Latin America, and APAC. If you consider headcount and revenue, two of the key metrics for growth, we've seen over 10 per cent month on month growth in revenue. We've been steadily adding to the team every month and gone up 10-fold from the time we started with a footprint across five countries now,” says Senthil.
The annual turnover of the company is close to USD 5 million.
Talking about the growth prospect, Senthil says besides its focus on Indian publishers, he is also actively working on the international market and has planned an aggressive growth path in South East Asia and the US.