Erik Tammenurm, co-founder and CEO of NEXD, has worked at NEXD from the beginning, starting as CEO of NEXD. Now, about 5 years later, NEXD has grown globally, with offices from London to Tokyo, and Erik has taken on the role of CEO. Test different creative solutions, messages, forms, and find the right combinations for your brand.

7. MEDIA: What inspired you to advertise and why did you choose NEXD?
ERIK TAMMENURM: Big question. Before founding NEXD, I was primarily involved in the development of mobile games and applications. Advertising seemed to be this mystical industry that seemed so outdated and focused on the wrong angle for solutions to work as expected. In 2014, I partnered with some of the industry leaders in Estonia in the field of advertising and we decided to start solving issues affecting advertising.

M7: How does NEXD work to help companies increase results? How do you provide them with a better return?
ET: I think the advertising was lost. You need to focus on the message, the form of the message, and the audience - in that order. Advertising is not just about audiences. This idea comes from faulty logic, but unfortunately this is currently the most common focus for advertisers. Adidas recently researched their advertising spending and found that 65% of their revenue comes from new consumers, but 80% of advertising spending goes to existing consumers. There is a huge difference between expectation and reality. That’s why we try to help advertisers achieve a great brand experience and make it as easy as possible for their audience to connect with the brand in a more meaningful way - increasing ROAS. I think consumers want to connect with the brands they use; the advertisement must be a conversation.
Nexd helps advertisers create an interactive branding experience to engage their audiences in a more meaningful way. Interactive and engaging ads are more memorable and help attract new customers to your brand. Our ads are designed to facilitate this conversation and are done in a very intuitive way. We’ve tried to remove the barriers that prevent many advertisers from creating good digital ads - namely the time and cost of complicated coding that comes at a huge cost - and make great ads accessible to everyone. Our goal is to help our customers increase RoAS, and I have to say that we have done very well in this. The future of advertising depends on finding new ways to connect with customers, and finding good and creative solutions is time consuming. and costly with standard solutions.

M7: What marketing channels do you use for advertising and which ones do you see as the most promising in terms of targeted customers?
ET: Our main channel is our newsletter and blog. I have always appreciated the content approach of customers - adding value to their time. We mainly distribute our content through community and email. We have a fairly extensive display, but that is primarily the purpose of awareness and exposure for us. I don’t see a very strong payback in B2B over display solutions.

M7: What role does content play in advertising? Which content format works best on your platform and why?
ET: Content is essential for B2B solutions. Good content is a great way for consumers to spend time with your brand and give you the opportunity to give them something back. I have always valued visual content - infographics, reports and videos, as well as webinars. I often try to put our clients in a position and see what would entice or help at any time. This enables us to solve our client’s problems or questions. Be more creative. Talk to the end user and 90% of the cases will result in a higher ROAS than a properly targeted but boring experience.

M7: What do you think are the top three marketing challenges in the post-COVID-19 era?
ET: Creativity - It's hard enough to be creative these days with all the tools available and within all market restrictions - your ad must be less than 4MB (otherwise blocked by browsers), can't animate too much (otherwise blocked by browsers)), It should load within 1 second. We at Nexd have built our solutions on brand new technology that comes from the game. It creates files that are quite small, fast enough, and load in 1 second. Our job is to give advertisers the tools to keep their creativity unlimited and to remove barriers and concerns about complying with those restrictions.

Data and audiences - the accuracy of the data is questionable at best. How we use and control this information is long overdue for a complete transformation across the industry. How confident can you be that someone is really reaching the right audience? Since GDPR / CCPA and browsers remove third-party cookies, it is now almost impossible to find the right audience, so why bet? I think being in context with the right message is much more valuable.
Scam - Did you know that roughly 5 cents for every dollar spent on advertising is a scam? By using old technologies, you lose more money every year. At Nexd, we have spent countless hours trying to overcome the possible operation of fraudulent players and do everything we can to prevent them from making money from our customers. There are also many other companies whose sole purpose is to ensure the security of their ads.

M7: In the world of Big Data, creativity gets stuck. Is there a way to balance both and create better advertising campaigns?
ET: As mentioned earlier, I think the data can be used in a very good way, but opacity is still an issue. Advertisers make the best decisions possible based on the information available to them. But are they using accurate data, or are their ads based on inaccurate data? What I’ve seen a lot lately is that most of the assumptions are about bad assumptions, and that ruins the whole message and severely undermines the effectiveness of their campaigns. The future of advertising depends on finding new ways to connect with customers, finding good and creative solutions is time consuming and costly along with standard solutions. This is the main reason I decided to launch Nexd.

M7: Wise words for advertising professionals?
ET: Be more creative. Talk to the end user and it will result in a higher ROAS in 90% of cases than a properly targeted but boring experience. Think about your assumptions about who you are advertising to. Focus your efforts on making sure you’ve nailed the right message and the right form. Test, test, test. Test different creative solutions, messages, forms, and find the right combinations for your brand. Advertising is constantly evolving and can be challenging at times, which I think is the most interesting part.


ABOUT THE FOLLOWING

Nexd is the creator of the fastest, easiest and most innovative advertising solution on the planet. Nexd is an easy-to-use online tool that allows marketers to create interactive, easy-to-use ads that truly engage their audience. Unlike platforms that compete with complex builders, Nexd is based on a simple, drag-and-drop layout, reducing production time from week to minute. Nexd is a step forward in how users interact with digital ads. Thanks to weight-saving and visually stunning ads, Nexd increases performance and offers higher RoAS compared to other solutions.
Nexd has a wide customer base in more than 20 markets on five continents, serving more than 3,000 campaigns from more than 200 brands, agencies and publishers.
Read more: https://advertising.report/c-suite-on-deck-nexd-erik-tammenurm?utm_source=Media%207&utm_medium=Neethu