Last year, B&T revealed that Aussie adtech business JustEggs had been acquired by Seedtag, a Madrid based global firm. At the time, JustEggs formed a critical part of Seedtag’s global expansion plans and would facilitate its launch into the Asia-Pacific region. Nine months on, we sat down with Nik Kontoulas, then-founder and CEO of JustEggs and now Seedtag’s ANZ MD.
Acquisitions can be challenging—particularly between tech firms—as processes clash, systems don’t mesh and tech stacks, well, behave like tech stacks.
But for Kontoulas, the acquisition has been an exciting, if “crazy” time.
“It’s been great. The acquisition marked a new era for us. We always believed the market was becoming more technology-based and it allowed us to introduce Liz, Seedtag’s contextual AI engine. Now we can start to look for new audiences, start to enhance our digital advertising and now we have a really innovative, proprietary, privacy-first solution,” he said.
“For me personally, it’s been fun and challenging, it’s a new dynamic to what I’ve had previously having not had a boss for 11 years!” It’s been both fun and challenging, offering a new dynamic compared to my previous experience over the last 11 years”.
As Kontoulas told us back in July, the move was not about an exit strategy for him, personally. Instead, it was about meeting the changing demands of clients and a rapidly evolving digital publishing environment where agencies needed to wean themselves of outdated and outmoded identity solutions before they started to get cookie withdrawal symptoms.
Back to the future?
Marrying Seedtag’s contextual ad solutions and AI technology, Liz, with Justeggs creative and location solutions seemed like a natural extension of both businesses’ offerings.
“Context is the new thing that everyone is talking about. It used to be viewability, then it was attention [and arguably still is] and now it’s context. At the end of the day, we’re selling media. People want to understand where they’re going to be. You can paint a pretty picture and explain how you got to a placement and why, but people don’t really care. They want something tangible. They want to see something tangible—they want to be aligning with context,” explained Kontoulas.
That idea is at once novel and nothing new. Buying media by its context, essentially, gave birth to the advertising industry as we know it in the 19th century. But the internet changed the way people buy media—using clicks, impressions and other metrics—rather than relying as much on the prestige of the title or the location of the billboard, for instance.
“Everyone is starting to say that they’re contextual because it is one of the ways to be privacy-first as it doesn’t use third-party data from the consumers. But we have to navigate around the market because we are one of only a few that offer their own contextual based solutions. For me, it’s still about the advertiser achieving their objectives in the best possible manner. I think the way to do that is to deliver context and intent because they’re the two most powerful things in advertising,” said Kontoulas.
Combining context and intent, however, is new. Kontoulas explained the fallacy of previous digital ad models where users would be targeted based on their demographics alone. It makes sense to the untrained, but in practice, it doesn’t help advertisers.
“It often doesn’t matter who your user is. For instance, if you’re selling Coke Zero—a product aimed at men—and you want to reach 18-34-year-old males, if you reach them that’s great. But if there’s someone outside that demographic who walks into a shop and buys a Coke Zero, you’re not going to say ‘No, you can’t buy this. It wasn’t targeted towards you,” said Kontoulas.
“It’s really to find what your users are thinking, their intent to purchase products and then line that with the actual content that they’re consuming. We’ll have a solution where people are wanting your product, searching and engaging with your product, but you’re also targeting them where they are.”
Data debates
At the same time, businesses are being faced with increasingly stringent data protection laws—and even scarier data breach fines. When much of the market is talking about hyper-personalisation at scale, delivered via generative AI from customer data stored in vast data lakes and data warehouses, being able to reach customers with a data-light approach will be music to the ears of legal counsels and risk managers the world over.
“There’s a couple of challenges happening within the market. The first is what to do with the data. Brands, advertisers and agencies are really scared at the moment on what they can do, what the laws are, what framework will come out with the Privacy Act? We’ve heard from some big advertisers in the last six months about that. They’ve been told they can have a first-party database built, but now it’s illegal to use it. So what do you do with it?” he said.
“The other thing is that it doesn’t scale. We’re in Australia, we have the same GDP as a small US state. One of the biggest global advertisers, we looked at their hashed IDs and it reflected 24,000 people. You can’t run a campaign on that. They build lookalikes based on cookies to help scale this data and now we’re back to square one.”
The newly merged Seedtag, though, is not stopping there. Once Liz is truly integrated into Justeggs’ products, the next port of call is CTV—something helped by Seedtag’s acquisition of US-based business Beachfront. Then it’s generative AI tools to help improve the offering further.
“The end goal? I don’t think there is one right now. But the idea is to keep pushing the boundaries,” said Kontoulas.
They often say you need to break a few eggs to make an omelette. But following its acquisition by Seedtag, Justeggs is one of the most exciting dishes on the menu.
