Inside VISA’s $11.4M ad spend: How one of the largest finance MNCs in the world is disrupting the e-payments market..

Founded in 1958, Visa is an American multinational finance company that facilitates electronic funds transfers throughout the world, most commonly through Visa-branded credit cards, gift cards, and debit cards. With operations across six continents, Visa processed 100 billion transactions during 2014 with a total volume of $6.8 trillion, according to a 2015 Nilsen report.  Let’s take a closer look at their advertising strategy: 2006: ‘Life Takes VISA’ After 20 years, VISA replaced their well-known tagline—”It’s everywhere you want to...

Surbhi Dhawan

Ad Networks › 7 min read

Reimagine Home: How Zillow’s using their $15.8M ad spend to dominate online real estate and fuel business growth.

Founded in 2006, Zillow is a real estate marketplace created by Spencer Rascoff (Cofounder of Hotwire),  and former Microsoft executives + founders of Expedia—Rich Barton and Lloyd Frink. Apart from providing the estimated value of homes across the United States, the platform also offers several other features including price comparison of homes in and around a certain area; price change of a property within a given time frame (from one, to five, or even 10 years), a “Make Me...

Surbhi Dhawan

Case Study › 8 min read

Breaking down HostGator’s $919.2K ad spend: How the web-hosting provider is using strategically-crafted campaigns to stand out from their competitors.

Founded in October 2002 by Brent Oxley (then a student at Florida Atlantic University), HostGator is a Texas-based provider of shared, reseller, virtual private server, and dedicated web hosting. By 2006, HostGator had crossed 200,000 registered domains and opened their first international office in Ontario, Canada. In 2008, HostGator reached 100,000 customers and started offering unlimited space and bandwidth as part of all hosting packages. Just a year later, they doubled their customer-base and launched toll-free numbers for customers...

Surbhi Dhawan

Case Study › 5 min read

Inside Vimeo’s $28M advertising strategy: How Youtube’s artsy, ad-free, alternative is making a dent in the video-sharing landscape.

Launched in 2004 by independent filmmakers—Jake Lodwick and Zack Klein—who wanted to share their professional/personal work online, Vimeo is an ad-free, video-distribution platform that caters primarily to a like-minded creative community. By Dec’13, Vimeo was representing 0.11% of the total Internet bandwidth with more than 22 million registered users, and 100 million unique visitors per month. Notable comedians like Kristen Schaal, “Weird Al” Yankovic and Reggie Watts have been actively using Vimeo to promote their content, alongside musicians like...

Surbhi Dhawan

Case Study › 7 min read

Monday.com raises $150M more in equity funding: Here’s an in-depth look into their $12M ad spend.

Formerly known as Dapulse, Monday.com is a team management platform that was founded in 2012 by Roy Mann (former C-level Executive at Wix) and Eran Zinman (former R&D Manager at Conduit Mobile). Based in Tel Aviv, Israel, the company raised a $1.5 million in a seed funding round to build a “next-generation” collaboration tool that allows you to create tasks, share files, plan workloads, and ultimately, visualize projects and processes that your team is collectively working on. Aside from...

Surbhi Dhawan

Case Study › 6 min read

There’s new money in town: How PayPal is using their $20.4M ad spend to attract and convert more customers.

Launched in 1998 as Continuity by Ken Howery, Luke Nosek, Max Levchin, Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, Paypal is an online payments system that works as an electronic alternative to conventional transaction methods like money orders and checks. Over the years, the company has operated worldwide as a payment processor for commercial users including online vendors and auction platforms, who benefit from one-click transactions, and seller protection in exchange for a nominal fee. After PayPal’s IPO was listed at...

Surbhi Dhawan

Facebook Advertising › 9 min read

How Groupon is using most of their $65.8M ad spend on video ads to successfully increase conversions.

Chicago-based Groupon was launched in 2008, and offers an eCommerce marketplace for people looking to purchase vouchers and coupons for a diverse range of local activities, goods, and services. Whether you fancy a cruise vacation, a romantic dinner or a manicure, you can simply use the platform to discover the best deals, discounts, and offers available around you. With 48.2 million active customers, the company currently operates in 15 countries and generated a revenue of US$2.84 billion in 2017....

Surbhi Dhawan

eCommerce › 7 min read

Mobile vs Desktop native ads : What are the key differences?

In today’s fast-paced, competitive landscape, brands everywhere are constantly re-inventing how they attract prospects and convert them into full-time customers. From media companies and publishers to eCommerce or consumer brands, there’s no denying the inevitable: Most consumers aren’t very responsive to traditional, disruptive banner ads anymore. As a result, the native ad spend has increased consistently in the last five years — simply because native ads seamlessly blend in with a website format, and are not disruptive to the...

Surbhi Dhawan

Advertising Basics › 5 min read

An introduction to HTML5 rich media ads and why brands should invest in them.

In the early 2000s, Adobe’s Flash became extremely popular with the advertisers everywhere, as it was the first time they were able to create animated, and interactive banner ads—for example, micro-games that allowed users to throw a ball, punch a monkey or shoot at ducks, as shown below.  While they were successful in capturing the audience’s attention, eventually ads using Flash’s ActionScript programming language started experiencing numerous security breaches that resulted in frequently released patches and newer version of...

Surbhi Dhawan

Advertising Basics › 5 min read

How brands can use competitive intelligence to scale in a global marketplace.

Competitive intelligence (CI) is the process of gathering, analyzing, and distributing data about companies, products, and customers in a specific marketplace to help managers in making more informed, strategic decisions. According to the  2018 State of Market Intelligence Report, companies monitor a diverse range of audiences, including customers, partners, direct competitors, indirect competitors, and prospects. In fact, 82% of them thoroughly track their own company as a necessary part of their CI efforts. With this attentive approach, they’re able...

Surbhi Dhawan

Scaling Campaigns › 5 min read