Moment Media Ltd is a performance-based online advertising company based in Seychelles. While it started as a small venture just two years ago, it now engages multiple media buyers to execute on its mission of converting low-value traffic into measurable results for online vendors.
A key aspect of its business lies in determining which products and services it should present to end-users who are exposed to its campaigns, whether via email lists or its online properties. There are thousands of advertisers out there, and hundreds of independent affiliate networks, so the challenge of separating the wheat from the chaff is a complex one to overcome.
Data is the currency of effective media buying
According to the company’s media buyers, it’s all about the data: they need to try many different types of offers to determine whether there is a good match with their traffic sources. Where does Moment Media source its data from? For the most part, the company operates on a level playing field and has access to the same marketing intelligence tools as everyone else.
However, the company has worked extensively to ensure that it’s able to garner its own proprietary intelligence from every campaign that it runs. This means it needs to crunch the numbers on both successful and unsuccessful campaigns to refine its formula and arrive at a profitable, repeatable approach. To this end, Moment Media Ltd engages in a considerable amount of A/B testing in all of its advertising campaigns and then aggregates the data into a master spreadsheet model that it uses to rank each campaign relative to all others.
The importance of developing your own technology
In a sense, media buying is a lot like trading in the financial markets: successful media buyers know that they need an informational edge over other media buyers in order to achieve sustainable results. For this reason, the company has channelled significant resources towards developing analytical tools for evaluating the merits of vendors and traffic sources.
The company has built up an innovative system for dynamically grading vendors and sources, using a combination of open source technologies and off-the-shelf analytics applications. Additionally, it has its own ‘affinity’ metric for calculating how well specific media sources are likely to match particular offers. Unfortunately, the details of this metric – and the algorithms that are used to calculate its values – remain tightly under wraps.
Moment Media Ltd finds its partners, not the reverse
Due to Moment media’s data-centric approach, it generally does not solicit inbound interest from publishers, advertisers or affiliate networks. Instead, it leverages its systems and tools to find out which firms it wishes to partner with. Once a prospective partner is identified, its media buyers will engage in reach-out to build a relationship before performing a series of tests. If the partnership yields results (or shows promise of potential yielding results), the company will double-down and continue to grow the activity until the opportunity has been exhausted.
