Joe Zawadzki ed Hervé Couturier (MINT): "Grazie alla nostra 'all in one platform solution' che assicura una governance integrata di tutti gli asset dell'advertising, un'offerta unica di valore, trasparenza ed efficienza per il mercato"

MINT top player mondiale nell’“Advertising Resource Management”,  ha di recente annunciato i brillanti risultati ottenuti nel 2022,  confermando una crescita record con un ulteriore + 34% rispetto all’anno precedente e con un significativo risultato nella “Rule of 40”: oltre il 70%.

Un successo legato anche ai nuovi clienti, aumentati di oltre il 25% nel corso del 2022, molti dei quali sono brand globali negli ambiti più diversi: dall’ Automotive alle Telco, da FMCG agli Energy Provider, dai Servizi Finanziari fino ad arrivare al mondo Fashion. Tutti si sono affidati a MINT per massimizzare la governance “end-to-end” delle proprie risorse di marketing. Infatti, la grande innovazione che rende MINT un big distintivo sul mercato è  l’Advertising Resource Management (ARM).

Per conoscerne tutte le potenzialità e le opportunità che la piattaforma della company offre alle aziende,  abbiamo intervistato due noti professionisti del mercato Madtech e membri del board di MINT: Joe Zawadzki, General Partner di AperiamVentures, un venture capital specializzato in  advertising and marketing technology, ed Hervé Couturier, private investor e product strategy consultant, anche Presidente della società di consulenza Kerney Partners.

I due manager hanno spiegato ad ADVexpress come il tool di MINT possa essere definito una 'all in one platform' che integra tutti i canali e tutti i media rispondendo  a un'esigenza forte riscontrata nel mercato, quella di affidarsi a un tool capace di gestire in modo integrato tutti gli asset legati all'advertising, migliorando l’efficienza dei processi. Un garante di governance, trasparenza ed efficacia attraverso tutta la filiera dell'advertising.  Ciò che rende distintivo e dirompente ARM è infatti la possibilità, offerta agli advertiser, ai Cmo, ai Cfo e ai vari head of digital di poter disporre di un unico sistema per la governance, il controllo e la gestione end-to-end dell’intero ciclo di advertising e dei relativi budget.

Il tutto grazie alla piattaforma ‘ARM Enterprise’, che garantisce in tempo reale la più avanzata e integrata governance delle advertising resources e alla piattaforma ‘ARM Retail’, che supporta la gestione e il controllo delle attività di digital advertising per brand che hanno rete distributive diffuse sul territorio. L’ulteriore innovazione è la possibilità che tali piattaforme possano essere personalizzate attraverso l’attività di ‘Feature Expansion’.

La company si caratterizza per un approccio data-driven allo sviluppo di ARM, grazie dati,  automazione e intelligenza artificiale, con chiari KPI, nell'ottica di assicurare ai clienti valore concreto e il raggiungimento degli obiettivi di business e a MINT le basi una crescita continuativa, concreta e globale. Infatti a gennaio 2023 la copmany ha aperto le Sales Operations in UK, entro fine aprile inaugurerà quelle in Germania e per l’estate è previsto lo sbarco negli USA,  grazie al valore offerto all'industry pubblicitaria sia nell'adv digitale che in quella offline. 

La parola a Joe Zawadzki ed Hervé Couturier. 

 Joe Zawadzki 

Ci descrive l'approccio di MINT, in termini di business model ed offerta e come grazie ad ARM, Advertising Resource Management, è in grado di assicurare alle aziende  efficienza nella gestione delle campagne pubblicitarie e negli investimenti e un advertising process completamente integrato.  

For a lot of marketers, you're seeing a tremendous amount of complexity and sometimes fragmentation: open web with respect to DSPs, SSPs, ad servers or walled gardens. For a marketer, when looking at that complexity, there is a tremendous amount of opportunity. If you can harness it, you can bring it all together, if you can stitch it into a kind of more seamless workflow, if you can push a button and activate at once across multiple platforms, if you can see all of your data come back in one place so you have a single pane of glass to be able to map all the various opportunities to your funnel into your business—wouldn't that be lovely?

MINT went out there and kind of realized that as the complexity of the opportunity grew, there wasn't a rationalizing layer. There wasn't some way for a sophisticated marketer to be able to orchestrate all of those opportunities in a seamless way. To some extent MINT discovered the ARM opportunity, and it's been amazing. MINT’s technology is something that sits on top of all the advertising and is able to connect all those dots and orchestrate. It has brought something new to the market that initially did not necessarily have the words for it, but has been clearly craving for the last half decade and.. the length of it’s here: MINT ARM.

Avete sviluppato oltre 350 integrazioni per garantire ai clienti una gestione deI loro asset pubblicitari in un'unica piattaforma. Come evolverà questa offerta competitiva sotto la spinta di dati e automazione?

MINT to some extent, is doing what the DSP should have done had it not required such depth in the management of real-time bidding, the demands of the open web and some of the competitive forces vis-à-vis to the walled gardens that are making it harder for that type of interoperability. MINT and its integrations have created the opportunity for another layer of abstraction and this orchestrator that actually sits on top of the DSPs and each of the other kind of more bespoke application platforms out there. So yes, on one hand, you sort of wished the journey finished in this concept of an operating system or a sort of a single platform that allows you to manage all of your touch points globally across channels. But the fact that here we are in 2023 and history
that doesn't repeat, but it rhymes. You have this sort of a secular shift in how media is being managed now and now the timing for MINT to create this kind of second order, third order, abstraction layer. I think it's just perfect for when complexity and opportunity meet with innovation and pragmatic thinking. Allowing people to now think less about how they're going to do the work and think much more about “what am I trying to accomplish,with respect to my business goals”?

Biografia

Joe Zawadzki serves as General Partner at AperiamVentures, a specialist venture capital firm focused on advertising and marketing technology. He is also Executive Director at Aperiam Growth Partners, providing consultation services to companies within the adtech Industry, accelerating their growth and business development. As an angel investor, Joe has seeded over 70 startups in the adtech ecosystem. Joe founded MediaMath in 2007, launching a technological revolution with the first demand side platform (DSP)

Hervé Couturier

Quale spinta pensi che MINT abbia ottenuto dal tuo ingresso nel board?

The board is composed of extraordinary people which are helping the company set challenging but important goals as well as shift the way the team thinks and acts, introducing a more fact-based approach to product development and a clear rationalization of progress. This process is a key step in ensuring that Advertising Resource Management (ARM) adopters from all over the world could get the value they need out of the SaaS solutions, and it focuses on installing a data-driven approach to product development that sees clear KPIs. When those KPIs are met, MINT's growth will have been efficient while setting solid foundations for the years ahead. The idea is to get MINT to a level where it can continue to grow on a global level for a number of years.

MINT gioca un ruolo di orchestratore nel processo pubblicitario, un asset che mancava in realtà agli advertiser, una all in one platform solution che integra tutti i canali e i media.  Quali risultati ha raggiuto MINT finora come SaaS?

What MINT has achieved is creating a solid foundation for future growth. The ARM products are solid and provide real value to a variety of clients - including Fortune 500 companies, but that was just the beginning. Now that both the market and MINT are ready, all companies, both Brands and Agencies, can have a full-stack advertising management solution that provides them with
governance, transparency, and efficiency across the entire advertising chain. The differentiating element comes from acting as an orchestrating layer on top of the entire advertising stack, enriching it with automation and artificial intelligence. The absence of this type of solution and the demand for it was so strong that they actually pushed the market towards segmenting a new category: Advertising Resource Management (ARM).

 MINT possiede i requisiti per un'espansione globale, ovvero clienti e risorse interne? Cosa manca per raggiungere una dimensione davvero globale? 

There are already Fortune 500 companies that benefit from using MINT, and that should sound like something obvious: the more complex the environment, the higher the benefit coming from a management solution. Same way as it is for an ERP for finance teams, or a CRM for sales ones. MINT already achieved what is most important to scale: product-market fit. The company is quickly expanding, launching markets like the UK, France, and Germany, with the US to come soon. I can be confident in MINT's growth because I can see the clear value it provides to the advertising industry, for both digital and offline advertising.

Quale è il tuo parere sull'integrazione di nuove forme di AI , come la più recente forma di AI generativa che appare molto più avanzata? Funziona con ARM?

Everything can fit, and nothing can fit. The goal should always be to provide clients with additional value, not just to ride trends. It's of course tempting to ride the waves, but that could mean a costly mistake in the future. With that being said, nothing should stop companies from providing the two: using disruptive tech like generative AI applied in ways that provide real benefits to the customers is often a great move.

Biografia

Hervé Couturier is a private investor and product strategy consultant. Hervé currently serves as President of Kerney Partners, a consulting firm. From 2012 to 2016, he was Executive Vice President, R&D, at Amadeus, an airline reservation systems provider. From 2007 to 2012, he was Executive Vice President of SAP AG’s Technology Group and Head of Research. He also serves as a board member for various public and private software companies, including Sabre Corp., Infovista Inc. and Kyriba Corp., and has held management positions at a number of IT companies including Business Objects, the worldwide leader of business intelligence solutions, now part of SAP, S1 Corporation, a provider of payment software for financial institutions, now part of ACI Worldwide, and XRT, a leading European treasury management software company, now part of the Sage Group PLC. He began his career at IBM in 1982, where he held various engineering and business positions until 1997