View Online Article

In this rapidly converging digital age, everything has become digitally accessible for users. From food to grocery, clothes to furniture, almost every commodity is available online via apps and their marketing which has nurtured the competition between online market providers. In rush of this new ecosystem, to make the brand/company at the forefront, one has to flow with the wave of digital transformation. A company which is remarkably accelerating the app marketing solutions and upgrades customer’s media experiences by driving unmatched digital innovation is Affle.

A Comprehensive Product Line

Affle is a global technology business that provides end-to-end solutions for App Marketing. The company has two business segments i.e. Consumer Platform & Enterprise Platform. Affle’s Consumer Platform comprises of proprietary consumer intelligence platform that delivers consumer acquisitions, engagements, and transactions through relevant mobile advertising. The platform utilizes user-intent indicators derived from behavioral signals, marketing attribution, and transactional data which are received in real-time and accumulated over time that increases the ability to predict user’s likely interests. It also enhances customer’s ad content with rich media experiences, interactive videos, games and augmented reality. This paired with data-centric scientific targeting and retargeting enables a higher likelihood of consumer engagement, such as downloading an app or completing a transaction.

The company’s Enterprise Platform provides end-to-end solutions for enterprises to enhance their engagement with mobile users such as developing apps, enabling offline to online commerce for offline businesses with e-commerce aspirations and providing enterprise-grade data analytics for online and offline companies.

Within the last 12 months, the company’s proposition has been strengthened with three major acquisitions. The most recent being ‘Shoffr Platform’, an Omnichannel (O2O) platform that converts online traffic into in-store walk-ins and transactions. Another in September 2018, ‘Vizury Commerce platform’ that provides retargeting media business and push notification offerings for e-commerce companies on a SaaS model. And Affle Global Pte. Ltd.’s acquisition of the Markt in March 2018, which was consequently acquired by Affle International when it had acquired Affle Global Pte. Ltd.’s business effective on July 1, 2018.

The Journey of Building an Exceptional Organization

Affle was founded in India in the year 2006 and the journey has been quite satisfying. The company currently has five offices spread across India, Singapore & Indonesia and has clients spread across the world.

Affle has built a patent portfolio with three patents to its credit in the US in the areas of consumer-acceptable advertising and one patent pending, while in India the company has twelve patents pending covering various algorithms of digital fraud detection and push notifications and partner pixelling for user identification.

With three successful acquisitions in the last 12 months strengthening the company’s proposition, Affle will continue to acquire businesses, assets, and technologies that complement its existing capabilities, revenue streams and marketing presence.

A Strong Leadership Team and Investors

Affle has built an experienced and dedicated key management team comprising of experienced personnel from the industry with experience ranging between 13 years to over 19 years. The company believes that it’s stable, senior management team has helped Affle in successfully implementing its development and operating strategies over the years which is proven with continued support from top global clients including established e-commerce companies, fintech, telecom, media, retail and FMCG companies & ad agencies. Affle’s investors on-board include entities such as Microsoft Global Finance, D2C Inc. (a subsidiary of NTT DoCoMo), Bennett Coleman & Co. Ltd. and Itochu Corporation amongst others.

Leveraging Data and Insights to Drive Engagement

Affle provides end-to-end solutions for App Marketing for consumers to spread across the world. The company’s MAAS (Mobile Audience as a Service) platform helps marketers to acquire new users backed by the consumer intelligence of over 1.51 billion consumer profiles from April ‘18 to October ‘18 on mDMP (Data Management Platform) platform while its mFaaS (Fraud Analytics as a Service) platform enhances quality through fraud detection & prevention.

Affle’s mTraction platform is an end-to-end user data, intelligence and engagement management platform for enterprises across multiple sectors and industries. Its data analytics suite enables insights on usage analytics, marketing attribution, and utilizes these for rules-based customer engagement to maximize the return on a customer’s marketing spend. mTraction CDP offers private cloud type of deployment options making it an attractive product for enterprises and governments that have access to a lot of personally identifiable user data and need a secure and trusted platform to store, segment and utilize it. The platform is a composite suite of various services like – app reusable components, app analytics, customer data platform for CRM and mobile ad fraud detection (mFaaS). Clients can use the whole suite or can pick one of the products which can be integrated through SDK or APIs.

Affle’s propositions for App Marketing was recently strengthened with the acquisition of Vizury’s commerce business that provides retargeting media business and pushes notification offerings for e-commerce companies on a SaaS model.

The company has also accomplished its omnichannel consumer platform with the acquisition of Shoffr, a Singapore-based Online to Offline (O2O) platform that converts online consumer engagement into in-store walk-ins and transactions. Shoffr enables online to offline consumer journey by converting online engagements into in-store transactions. It reveals offline retail stores inventories online via API and programmatic links and provides catalog management, order management with measurable ROI to retail brands.

This acquisition has filled the missing link by providing an integrated consumer journey and allows brands to transparently attribute the impact of digital advertising on in-store footfalls and transactions.

Embracing Artificial Intelligence to Offer Customized Solutions

Advertising technology (Ad tech) companies have simplified advertising in the digital world with the help of data analytics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. Affle uses an artificial intelligence-based rules engine to detect behavior analysis from various sources and use that data to determine a user’s interests and if the user is a fraudulent user. With its data intelligence, machine learning infrastructure coupled with AI, the company assists businesses in reaching out to the end user with customized solutions.

Last year, Affle had partnered with IMDA (Infocomm Media Development Authority of Singapore) to work as a touchpoint to raise needs and concerns on Cloud-Native Architecture to the relevant stakeholders and closely work together on strategies to support adoption of Cloud-Native Architecture amongst Singapore-based enterprises.

Staying on The Edge with Innovation

Affle’s twin approach has differentiated it for optimizing over good data (from our mDMP) and filtration of bad data / non-human traffic (from our fraud platform “mFaaS”) together with ad unit optimizations on MAAS platform that has helped the company to consistently find the most relevant and ROI worthy consumers for its advertisers.

Between April ‘18 to October ‘18, Affle’s Consumer Platform had approximately 163+ billion data points across the world. Affle is one of the very few companies that have products spanning across the entire value chain in digital advertising, be it DMP (data management platforms), DSP (demand-side platforms) / SSP (supply-side platforms), fraud detection or ad network.

Exemplifying Business Excellence

The company has been conferred with prestigious accolades from established industry forums like IAMAI Awards, MOBEXX Awards, Drivers of Digital Awards, MMA Smarties Awards, India Digital Marketing Awards, India Digital Crest Awards & Digixx Awards over the years.

While Affle’s platforms have been accredited by IMDA (Infocomm Media Development Authority of Singapore) for data/ information security; placing the company amongst the first few companies in its domain accredited by a well-respected government body. This accreditation is based on technical assessment of security, reliability, usability and maintainability as well as business sustainability, scalability, leadership, and management.

Fulfilling the Vision of Better Tomorrow

Affle believes that the Indian market presents high barriers to entry, given its unique challenges such as a disjointed demographic, which is just getting habituated to digital applications (such as the use of e-commerce, digital payments, etc.) and low CPCU (Cost Per Converted User). In the last two calendar years, only about 25% of all Internet users in India have shopped online. Frost & Sullivan India Pvt. Ltd. (“Frost & Sullivan”) believes that this makes it a more challenging landscape for marketing tech to be able to discern the users who have the highest propensity to transact online. India can be a hard market to sustain, even for market participants who are globally successful. The range of CPCU in India is quite low compared to the global market. Frost & Sullivan believes that achieving profitability in such a price-sensitive market is possible only for companies that are familiar with the dynamics of consumer profiles and have a track record of working alongside brands locally for years. (Source: Report prepared by Frost & Sullivan on “Industry Insights on the Advertising and Ad Tech Market dated July 12, 2018).

Affle believes its extensive consumer profile data, proprietary technology, and local knowledge makes the company better placed compared to global peers to deliver profitability in India.