After last week’s part one-of-three of our fifth entry in the docuseries – Walk and Talk with NetRefer – we’re back with Mark Scerri Pace for the second part at the Valletta Contemporary.
This time, Mark lifts the cover off NetRefer’s Product Delivery’s current projects and successfully delivered ones, while revealing how these change the way NetRefer’s Performance Marketing Platform operates on several levels.
Mark, can you give a brief explanation of how NetRefer’s current Performance Marketing Platform operates, and in particular, how it helps your clients on their Affiliate Marketing journey?
As I said previously, we started as a rewards engine – the calculator that calculates the commissions. Today, we’re a 360-degree marketing platform. So, it starts with Affiliate Management – affiliate signing up – to Media Management – so managing media for our operators; serving that media through ads, tracking what’s happening on those ads – in other words, clicks and views; and also, tracking the player’s journey, so we can attribute which affiliate a player comes through. We also manage payments. So, whatever comes out of our rewards engine in terms of payments is managed. And then, we can report on any of these aspects within the product.
Onboarding, ads, tracking, reporting: you’ve evolved this into 360-degree all-singing, all-speaking solution to the affiliate marketing journey.
Yes, it can track anything from the moment a player views an ad up till a bet or a spin at a casino.
Delving into the day-to-day of your own team and the various departments within it, are there any exciting projects you’re working on that you’d like to talk about with us?
Sure, we’ve been busy for more than a year, focusing mainly on two streams – optimization and automation.
The word “automation” is used a lot today in media. What does that actually mean?
Automation mainly seen from two perspectives. First, there’s internal automation that refers to automating our own processes. For example, our release process. We have the availability to release new features much more frequently and faster than before.
There’s automation of the infrastructure as well. We’ve worked really hard on bolstering our current infrastructure so that we’re able to adequately manage our 120 clients currently on board.
Then, there’s automation from a client’s perspective, specifically within technical solutions delivery. Before, whenever we were delivering these solutions, we used to rely on a manual process. Nowadays, we’re moving towards a more automated process. So, be it onboarding a new client, integrating a brand for an existing client or if they decide to create a new product – that process is now automated.
If a client is sitting in their chair and they decide that they’re ready to go, they can get to the product and start seeing the fruit of that decision using the platform faster now with the automation in place, right?
Yes, correct. The time it’s going to take for a client to integrate a new brand now is a lot shorter than before. And most importantly, there’s less human intervention and the quality that’s coming out now is much better.
You had also mentioned that you were focusing on optimization.
Yes, regarding optimization, we focused a lot on the data aspect of things. So, as a platform, we’re processing a substantial amount of data for 120 operators, some of which are the largest in the industry. We’re optimizing the way we’re handling that data and we’re also optimizing the way we’re presenting that data.
This is the most visible aspect from a client perspective. The time it takes you now to load a report, for instance, to get your insights to be able to optimize, is going to be much faster.
That whole analytics aspect of getting the data – the reports loaded and insights gained that allow for decision-making – is happening faster.
Yes. In our industry, being fast is very important because now, both operators and affiliates, through that optimized way of serving data, can optimize their operations and their campaigns much better.
Pulling back slightly to the legacy of the company and NetRefer’s 15-year history, what’s different about how the Performance Marketing Platform operates today as opposed to how it used to operate in the past.
Today everything is supported on our infrastructure. But there was a limit as to what we could take with our infrastructure. In fact, we’re growing in terms of our number of clients, so we’ve embarked on, what I believe is, our most important project this year, which is Lift & Shift. This simply translates to moving our infrastructure from a physical server to the cloud.
This is also going to enable us to start exploring other markets because now we have that scalability that we desire. This is just the first step. It will pave the way for, what I believe is, the biggest evolution at NetRefer, which is basically offering our Performance Marketing Platform as a service not only to individual clients but to all our clients.
This means that you’ve gone from an early phase where your commission-calculating software was deployed on each client’s end-machine to a consolidated phase, where you’ve got a single piece of infrastructure serving to the future now. As a result, now, you’ve got a cloud solution as a service that really offers many more capacity and scalability opportunities.
It’s going to enable us to go into new markets, namely Latin America, Russia, Africa and Asia.
Dexter Cutajar – Head of Commercial – who we spoke to in a previous Walk & Talk mentioned those key markets. I presume that giving him the capacity and the scalability is crucial here, right?
Lift & Shift is important because it’s the first step towards achieving that piece as well.
You mentioned some 120 clients. Then, presumably from here the numbers can just increase.
The sky is the limit.
Very exciting! Thank you, Mark.
Watch the 3rd installment of Mark’s 3-part interview to gain a sneak peek of Product Delivery’s – and the Performance Marketing Platform’s – way forward into the future.
A special thank you goes out to Andrew Bonello for conducting the interview.