Alexander Gösswein is Regional Managing Director of Central Europe, Middle East, and Russia at Criteo. Previously, he served as Managing Director DACH, overseeing Criteo’s business in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Alex has over 17 years of experience in the marketing and media sector, and has held leading positions at Yahoo! (Overture) and Microsoft Advertising. Before joining Criteo, he built up goviral Germany, which was acquired by AOL Europe in January 2011.
We had the chance to chat with him about the biggest marketing challenges and opportunities in the ad-tech market today.
The growth of digital has complicated advertising.
According to Alex, “on the one side nothing changed, and on the other side everything changed”.
“We saw really an acceleration over the last five years,” he told us. “The digital landscape came on top of the traditional ways of reaching users.” The growth of the digital ecosystem, including the mobile and app world, have made advertising “much more complex, much more data-driven today than it was five years ago.”
What customers really want is curated experiences.
When it comes to what today’s customers want, Alex believes they “want to have fun when they buy. And they want to see curated offers from the brands and from the retailers. So they want to have the perfect personalized recommendations across all the various channels.”
“The user of today, he’s expecting great convenience and pleasure while searching for new products. Today, people do not necessarily need new products, so what they do for buying is for pleasure, in most of the regions we are working in. So as a brand and as a retailer you have to deliver perfect convenience and great experience across all the different channels.”
Data is key to reaching more users.
Alex notes that: “Data is the new oil in advertising. More data and the better data you have, the better and the more efficiently you can target your users. Because there are few faithful and loyal users today, so the better you can reach them, the better for you.”
“The smaller you are, the more data you might use from others in order to do efficient advertising. Ultimately it makes sense to combine data from different sides in order to get the full picture of the user.”
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