Find out how Accountinsight nabbed the award for ‘Emerging vendor of the year’

Find out how Accountinsight released its 2020 first version of a full account-based advertising platform ( ie a B2B DSP) built for media and B2B agencies and won the Gold for ‘Emerging martech vendor of the year’.

About the vendor

Accountinsight was founded in 2018 to offer programmatic Account Based Advertising (ABA) to media buying agencies,initially (due to existing relationships) those within WPP PLC’s GroupM network.

During the first year, its technology was offered as a managed service but it soon became clear that customers wanted to be closer to execution as programmatic media buying in general is becoming a more common skill in the marketplace.

Since the end of 2019, Accountinsight developed its software with the vision to create a SAAS tool aimed at a far wider audience – general B2B marketing agencies and B2B teams who wish to run their own programmatic account-based advertising campaigns.

Accountinsight believes that this would create a new software category, rather as did Eloqua, Hubspot and Marketo with marketing automation several years ago. The next step in B2B communication is programmatic advertising and it will need an efficient B2B DSP for use by non-specialists, linked to algorithms which optimise campaigns to reach and accuracy and automatically boost performance by exploiting high engagement ratios.

Accountinsight is a global technology solution that has customers from both large media companies ( like GroupM’s Mediacom, WaveMaker…) and advanced B2B agencies like BBN Network. As opposed to traditional Account Based Marketing ( ABM ) platforms, it is born within media and focus 100% on being a media activation partner. The programmatic space has a myriad of DSPs that have basically B2C focus. Accountinsight’s USP is to have built a B2B DSP by and for professional media buyers.The company is fully controlled by its founders, with some equity released to early ‘angel’ investors and in the process of closing a first round of VC investors.

About its solutions

Accountinsight is a media activation platform. As such Accountinsight’s vision is that a B2B DSP solution can target the right B2B companies and identify the right media consumption signals from its employees to ensure it displays banner advertising with 100% relevance and accuracy.

It gives customers the ability to target companies individually, with full control over the choice of media, frequency of impressions per account-site and context of placement.

The development road-map includes a) the offering of Programmatic B2B in China (technical integrations already in place as Q1/2021), b) the increase of integrations with global/local ad-exchanges ( over 50 to date), c) the increase of research on IP targeting identification and d) increasing the self-service options so it transfers from Managed Service to SaaS model.

About its customers

Customers are media companies ( Mediacom, Wavemaker), B2B Agencies ( BBN Network…). Customers can be very large companies but also small B2B agencies that offer specialised B2B services to one or a few large B2B companies. These tend to

be in IT Segment, Healthcare, Logistics, Automotive – in general industries with long selling cycles – The buying decision is typically from the programmatic teams that manage the end-customer relationship.

Customer satisfaction, loyalty and development

Customer retention is very high amongst professional media buyers. These tend to know what to ask for from in terms of brand safety, 3rd party tracking, transparency…. and value the way Accountinsight can address the real challenges in B2B

targeting that traditional DSP’s do not provide. As such Accountinsight has retained as customers all media companies that have worked with them since 2018, and Accountinsight sees the same with advanced B2B agencies that already have programmatic teams in place.

Advocacy

As Accountinsight gain recognition within its initial customer base, it’s helping to produce a series of podcasts in March 2021 on (B2B)media and advertising, focused on the way the landscape is changing for media and advertising for B2B brands.

The goal is to create inspiring thought-leadership content for the C-suite and senior subscriber base. It has confirmed Chris Hirst, CEO of Havas UK, Ricky Abbot, President of Agency Transmission and they’re expecting Mediacom’s UK CEO to join too as well as senior members of BBN Network and Expandi Group.

Tech enhancements

During 2020 Accountinsight has continued with the efforts to move from managed service to SaaS. As such, it has completed 2 product releases that now give customers the ability to run about 50% of the tasks needed in campaign set-up and 100% of the activities that improve company targeting & performance.

Market engagement and/or leadership

During 2020, Accountinsight was able to establish a name as a solution of reference to deliver Account Based advertising by Media Agencies and form strategic partnerships with large B2B Agency networks. Alongside with that, B2B agencies have started to realise that adding Account Based Advertising to their ABM agency services is the most effective way to increase their revenue per customer, attract and retain new clients and, eventually, be more successful as they can control the delivery of more touch-points and channels in the buying journey.

Business performance

Despite of the market disruption due to the situation imposed by covid-19, the year 2020 ended with an increase in customers and sales vs. 2019, with very high retention rates & the onboarding of some major customers ( Havas, one of the largest advertising group and BBN International).

“At BBN, we pride ourselves in offering cutting edge B2B advertising solutions for our clients (...)This strategic partnership with the AccountInsight team will add a hugely valuable dimension to how we as an agency support our clients and keep them on the forefront of B2B media innovation.”

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