CtrlShift restructures into three units

CtrlShift, an audience solutions company, has reorganised the business into three units – The Hub, The Studio and The Lab – with its flagship media management product, The Hub, at its core.The restructure will allow the company to have a scalable, technology-led, data-sciences based approach to the market. CtrlShift will continue to offer data-driven marketing services to companies requiring a comprehensive tech-plus-services package.The Hub is a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform used by agencies and brands to facilitate efficient media-buying at scale across multiple channels and buying ecosystems. It is expected to be the key growth driver for CtrlShift. The Studio focuses on providing audience-focused marketing solutions. The Lab is the data sciences-focused research and development (R&D) unit of the company.The company added that The Hub is currently integrated with eight buying platforms in the open ecosystem as well as Google and Facebook, giving it access to almost 100% of automated inventory in major markets. The platform also provides real-time updates of campaign performance with cross-channel metrics unified on a central reporting dashboard.“The digital advertising industry is broken – it is optimised for the intermediaries at the expense of brands and publishers. On average 60 to 70 cents out of each media dollar is siphoned off before it gets to the publisher. While technology and automation have greatly enhanced our ability to target audiences in real time, the continued fragmentation and complexity of the industry have caused major inefficiency and confusion. While companies like Google and Facebook have created “pre-packaged” full stack (inclusive of DMPs, DSPs, ad servers and analytics tools) solutions to address the complexity, issues like pricing transparency and data retention remain unresolved,” Reza Behnam, co-founder and executive chairman at CtrlShift, said.“The Hub attempts to address this by allowing brands to access and optimise campaigns across multiple technology and inventory partners simultaneously. Think of The Hub as having the ease-of-use of pre-packaged full-stack solutions, while revealing the best combination of partners for your specific objective as they compete to optimize your media dollar.  Essentially, we are taking care of media-buying execution in a risk-free, transparent way so that brands can focus on strategy and planning,” Behnam added.“The Hub has a recommendation feature which leverages data-science models that learn from historical campaign data to provide insights to optimise campaigns. It does this by proactively suggesting specific tactics to improve performance - which websites to whitelist, which platforms to buy through, how to allocate budgets - and by predicting the impact of choosing a certain set of inputs. Tactics recommended by The Hub have helped our traders consistently outperform client benchmarks,” Ganga Chirravuri, CIO and global head, Platform Solutions at CtrlShift, said.Recently, CtrlShift has also gone through restructuring and reshuffling among its employees. In May, CtrlShift appointed Syahar Khalid as its senior director of business development, and in August last year, the company hired Deepika Nikhilender as CEO and Shelly Maneth as chief financial officer (CFO). Serm Teck Choon, head of product then, was also given the additional responsibility of country head of Malaysia.