NEW YORK, Aug. 30, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Latin American
publisher-owned multiplatform media company Medula has
been managing Microsoft's commercial representations in LatAm
for almost a year now. That is why Portada, the leading Source on
Latin Marketing and media, spoke to Kenneth Andrew, General
Manager, Advertising & Online Emerging Markets at Microsoft,
and Alejandro Mondrzak, Corporate SVP & CEO of the Digital
Business Unit at Grupo Clarin (a Medula shareholder), to
discuss why this kind of collaboration is so important in today's
global economy.
Medula Positions Itself as Rep for Premium Global
Publishers
Medula offers media buying, content, programmatic, mobile and
video services, with a special focus on the premium audiences and
content that make Latin America
unique. Javier Chanfreau was
appointed CEO of Medula in July
2015, and among other deals, he immediately secured a
partnership with Microsoft to manage its ad sales in the region.
Medula's properties include Grupo
Clarin from Argentina, Grupo Copesa
from Chile, Grupo Opsa from
Honduras, and PAL (Periodicos
Asociados de Latinoamérica).
Gaining Microsoft as a client helped secure the company's place
as a top representative company for premium worldwide
publishers.
As Latin America has become
increasingly attractive to dynamic businesses looking to expand
their global reach, Medula's goal is to become their go-to media
partner in the region, leveraging its local expertise and
longstanding relationships with local commercial ventures.
Microsoft has its own impressive set of properties and brands
(Skype, Bing, MSN and Xbox, to name a few), and is ambitiously
pursuing opportunities to reach global audiences as it
develops its business model.
Microsoft Turns to Medula for Support in New Ad-Driven
Revenue Model
One would be hard-pressed to think of a more global or dynamic
company than Microsoft. The company has recently switched from a
business model focused on selling its products and operating
system, Windows, to offering those products for free, working with
a revenue model based on advertising to subsidize its users' free
experiences.
"Microsoft Advertising has free consumer assets that millions of
people use every day, but the principal revenue stream is through
advertising. We are constantly evolving how we provide those to
agencies and brands, and have a longstanding relationship with
Medula in Latin America,"
says Kenneth Andrew, General
Manager, Advertising & Online Emerging Markets at
Microsoft.
Microsoft has been partnering with AppNexus to run its
programmatic operations for a year now, and getting Medula in on
the action meant that Medula and AppNexus could form a symbiotic
relationship, the former making use of its tight relationships with
agency trading desks, buying from an audience perspective, and the
latter working with big advertisers on sponsorships and branding
opportunities in the region to reach mass audiences.
Microsoft is happy to leave this hard work in such capable
hands, freeing up its own resources for other aspects of its
business in the region that do not require such local
expertise.
Medula Eyeing U.S. Hispanic Market
On top of its impressive performance in Latin America, Medula has also a strong focus
on the US-Hispanic market, and Alejandro Mondrzak, Corporate
SVP & CEO of the Digital Business Unit at Grupo
Clarin says that Microsoft is giving the company the scale
that it needs to succeed in this venture.
Mondrzak asserts that Medula knows how different Latin American
and US Hispanic markets are, and that there are practically two
companies, one dedicated to each market. "The US-Hispanic market is
truly a huge opportunity, and as much as it is different from
Latin America, we have unique
abilities and capabilities and a regional reach that we can adapt
to the US market," he says. "It's a learning process with a curve,
but we are doing our best to understand it."
Microsoft Properties Offer High Visibility,
Flexibility
In terms of specific properties, "MSN is seeing a strong level
of engagement with the content experience, and Skype is hugely
relevant in the communications space. We want to make more native
advertising opportunities there to immerse people in advertising
while they are reading content," Andrew says. Bing is also a key
property, as search has become "so ubiquitous throughout the user
experience, evolving from allowing you to find information to
enabling you to take action and gain knowledge at the same time,"
says Andrews. Search is also very profitable, and serves as a
platform through which many applications can be integrated.
Companies like Microsoft are ultimately looking for "the best in
breed, with local insight and knowledge and excellent sales
people," Andrews explains. "Medula shows and demonstrate the values
that are important to Microsoft. We invest in these partnerships
and hold them to high quality. Medula is adapting and learning to
reinvent their business as programmatic grows as a way of buying,
because we need to capture the traditional reserve demand as well
as programmatic."
About Portada
Portada, www.portada-online.com, is the leading source of news
and analysis on the Latin Marketing and Media space. We offer
world-class news and intelligence through audited online, print and
conference vehicles to highly targeted audiences. Portada's mission
is to help professionals in Business and Media understand and reach
Hispanic consumers in the U.S. Credibility is our biggest asset:
The Portada team is very passionate about producing high-quality
independent content that helps drive forward the Latin Marketing
and Media space.
CONTACT: Kelley Eberhardt,
kelley@portada-online.com
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SOURCE Portada