The following is a guest post by Alban Denoyel, CEO of Sketchfab. You can follow him on twitter @albn
Ezakus, the French leading DMP (data management platform) for advertisers, has just announced a key partnership with MotionLead, who specializes in Rich Media Mobile advertising. I took this occasion to seat down with Christophe Camborde, CEO of Ezakus, who just moved to NYC. Having been through the same relocation from Paris to NYC 10 months ago, it was nice to have his feedback on where his company is heading, 2 years after the launch. I also had a quick call with Arthur Querou, MotionLead’s CEO, who just started operations in the Bay Area.
Can you tell us a bit more about what this partnership means, and how did it all happen?
CC: MotionLead is a trio of guys I met not long ago. They went through Epita, and they want to do business. They are part of this new generation of geeks who not only get code, but get business as well. There are tones of those in California, but not that many in France. I’m about to be 40 soon, and they are 20 years old. It’s the first time I work with people who are half my age, and the goal is to merge two cultures. They want to be serial entrepreneurs, and we are happy to share what we’ve learned.
AQ: We teamed up with Christophe because we realized we were talking to the same clients, with the same ambition: bring performance on pre-targeting advertising. We were just doing it with different means: data for them, rich media for us. We have very different cultures and background: we are mobile natives, and we specialize in display. They are people of the backend, of big data. But we clearly know what value we bring to each other, and both feel it’s a perfect fit.
What is the offer and what’s behind the tech?
CC: What we are creating and selling is a high quality mobile format for ads, with very engaging content, plus it’s targeted. The format is highly customizable, and works on iOS and Android. We merged our two technologies at Christmas, and now I’m able to pre target this for a specific segment. So when you get an amazing format from MotionLead, and beautiful data from Ezakus, you have a unique offer: rich media plus rich data. And the go-to market is the same, so we can sell this to our existing clients
AQ: MotionLead has built a framework to edit campaigns, so that the average agency guy can start with just his psd, and map our tech on top of it. We are focusing on native formats only, and use LUA, which is a standard for video game programming. It’s more powerful than JavaScript or html5, and from a data standpoint, we get way more info with LUA: touch events, time spent, scrolls, etc…
So what’s the US plan?
CC: I just moved here, by myself. I have 40 employees in France, but I’m starting from scratch here. I have been preparing this for a year. Today I don’t have any US client, and my main question is the go to market here. I don’t understand baseball, I don’t know who won last weekend, so there’s obviously a lot to learn 🙂
AQ: We are working on shipping a platform aimed at scaling our sales, so that we can attack the US market more aggressively. It’s great that we are both expanding to the US at the same time.