Here is my latest exclusive Q&A with a “company to watch” in the digital media world. This time, meet LA/Silicon Beach-based ad-tech company, Kiosked, and its Founder & Head of International Business, Antti Pasila. Kiosked is a company born out of deep technology developed out of Finland, which has become a hot-bed of innovation. Antti, in fact, just recently relocated from Finland to Los Angeles to take the company's technology (and the service on which it is based) global. The company’s mission is to bring deep online engagement and impact for brands via seamless and non-obtrusive ad insertion as consumers scroll over any video within its fast-growing network of participating sites. Watch a video of any kind (not just an ad) -- scroll over something you like (let’s say, a pair of sneakers worn by an actor) -- and, voila, you see a precise match for those sneakers (and have an opportunity to buy them right then and there). The company’s mission is bold, but so are its blue chip backers, who include technology legends such as Kaj Hed (majority owner of Rovio -- “Angry Birds”) and Kevin Wall of Craton Equity Partners (and CEO of legendary live event producing company Control Room). These and other investors have invested over $12 million into the company. I have followed them closely. I like what I see.
On with the questions:
(1) What is the reason your company exists (and what problem(s) are you looking to solve)?
When we started Kiosked we saw that there are some fundamental problems with today’s online marketing and in how online publishers are making money with their content. We created a way to solve both problems by making them help each other. There are some inherent problems we were looking to solve:
-- Online ads are not performing well. Click-through-rates have fallen from 9%to 0.1% in the last 15 years while marketing budgets are growing double digits. This doesn’t add up since publishers are running out of ad space to generate the required revenue -- and all this leads to a worse end user experience.
-- You don’t need to shout and spam if you can deliver your message at the right time to the right person. SEM is a good example of better targeted marketing. It delivers the right kind of marketing message to a consumer at the right time. The drawback with SEM is that, in that case, the consumer already needs to know what they want.
-- Online publishers are in deep trouble and many of them are really struggling to make money with their content. The huge amount of content available for free and the poor performing marketing models are creating myriad problems for many publishers. High quality content creates a high degree of shopping impulses, but publisher are very bad at taking advantage of them -- and monetizing them.
In a nutshell, Kiosked helps brands and merchants to sell and communicate more effectively online and, at the same time, we help online publishers to monetize their content and the impulses they create.
(2) How are you different from your competitors?
We have competitors on all the different verticals we work on -- but no one else has created an end-to-end platform like we have. Our business is two sided -- on one side we work with brands and merchants, and on the other side we work with online publishers. The platform we built connects these two in a scalable and highly automated way.
We are the only company in our market that is media and platform agnostic, meaning that our technology works on any type of visual content (images, video, broadcasting, apps etc.), on any type of publishing real-estate (blogs, social media, news sites, stores etc.) and adapts an optimal user experience for all connected devices. Compared to other companies in the various verticals in which we work, we are superior in automating the service and overall value proposition. Both the content enriching algorithm which makes us an extremely scalable solution for publishers with large amounts of content -- and the real time e-commerce integrations we built to connect with our merchants -- make us very unique in many ways.
(3) Why will you succeed (and what is your single most important ingredient for success)?
I think we will succeed because we know what we are doing, we understand where the market is going, and we are very consistent in what we do. We’ve been building Kiosked with the original blue print for 3 years, while iterating almost daily. We listen to customers and are very analytical in what we do. I feel like we also have an extremely good balance between creative design and following data we collect.
The market we are in is massive and it is growing double digits every year. In 15 years e-commerce will be 4 times bigger than it is today. Online is becoming the single most important source for content consumption, and the mobile phone will change the way we do shopping in the future. There’s an almost unlimited amount of opportunities for us to close on -- and we are confident that we are addressing the right things now to grow with the market and evolve as consumer behavior changes.
All this is good, but without the people there’s nothing. Without a doubt the single most important ingredient for our success will be and is our team. Our team consists of 70 immensely talented people with different skill sets and backgrounds. Our investors and advisors are world class, and we’ve been lucky enough to partner with some of the best companies in their respective industries to make sure Kiosked becomes a huge success.
(4) What makes you unique (and what do you enjoy most outside of building your business)?
Besides having a great passion for the things I do, I’m genuinely interested in everything and anything, especially if it has to do with technology or business. I fall asleep every night listening to a documentary, and I read a lot (not books -- mostly short articles).
For the last 3 years Kiosked has been my work and hobby. I love to work and I know that people around me can see that as well. The little spare time I have, I love spending it with my friends both in Finland and USA -- and most of it usually with my best friend and wife, Johanna.
(5) What digital media trend is most interesting to you (and what is the least)?
There are so many trends to choose from. The whole industry is being turned upside down and inside out. It would be lame to say that in-content commerce and marketing would be the most interesting trend, so I’m not going to pick that.
I think some of the truly interesting trends out there are within content creation, distribution and consumption. It’s changing, a lot and fast. I haven’t seen the obvious winning concept yet, but it’s needless to say that the whole industry, from production to distribution is going to change. When you walk down the streets of Singapore or Hong Kong, you can’t miss the masses of people who are walking to work their eyes glued to their phones, watching the latest episode of gossip girl or the daily news that they started watching at home. We haven’t seen this in Europe and USA yet (at least in the same scale), but many of the other mobile trends also took some time before they prospered in the Western markets -- and I’m curious to see how that will play out.
Creation of content is also changing fast. Today you don’t need a $100 million dollar budget to create a high quality movie -- and crowd-funding is changing the overall entertainment order of things. What will the business of studios like Warner Bros look like in 10 years? I bet Tarantino or Scorsese could raise the capital for creating their next blockbuster by selling pre-ordered tickets or VOD premiers through their social channels, instead of raising money from studios and investors. How these changes will impact overall quality of content is something I’m really interested about.
The least interesting trend for me is the rise of the IM apps (like Snap chat and WhatsApp). Of course I understand why they might be good businesses -- as well as their overall value -- but I just don’t understand why there needs to be so many different channels for communicating when the phone itself has calling and texting capabilities. It might be that I was just born in the wrong decade.
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