Publisher Spotlight: Booster Box
Can you briefly introduce yourself?
Hi there! My name is Gianluca Binelli, founder of Booster Box, a scientific performance marketing agency. Prior to Booster Box, I spent 6.5 years in Google across Dublin, NYC and London. I managed online marketing for Google’s products in EMEA and was an advisor for Google’s own equity fund Capital G.
Can you introduce Booster Box and its core business values?
Booster Box is a scientific performance marketing agency. This is just a complex way to say we use a data-driven approach to run wildly successful international campaigns that are helping advertisers reach their ROI goals. We have developed technologies and methodologies that can help advertisers invest their money better. The 3 core values at Booster Box are:
- Dataism: our religion is data. To put it simply: we use data to take any single decision within the company, from choosing the coffee brand for the mini kitchen to how much we should invest on a certain channel. Relying heavily on data is something that permeates every single aspect of our company so we try to measure as many things as possible and try to make decisions based on numbers as much as we can.
- Ownership: every single person working at Booster Box is owner of his/her specific project; this means that even the very last intern is going to make the final call on the project owned even if his boss thinks otherwise (of course any decision needs to be backed up by data!). In a nutshell, we believe that with great power comes great responsibility, but also the opposite: with great responsibility comes great power, meaning we try to give everyone working at Booster Box a lot of responsibility in order to unleash their intellectual power.
- Automation. We are lazy: we have automated most of the boring bits so we can focus on the fun part: driving impact. Life is already too short to spend hours and hours improving campaigns one keyword at a time or pulling data into a report. This is why we turned to building our own scripts and tech to do things for us. Which means more hours to look at the bigger picture and focus on what matters.
Tell us more about your audience and what types of advertisers do you work best with?
In recent times, here at Booster Box, we got the chance to spin-off a new branch of our agency, creating a department fully dedicated to affiliate. At the moment we are focusing on 3 main verticals:
- Lead Generation for Medical Equipment (i.e. Hearing Aids). We connect retailers with people who are considering their need of a hearing aid, offering a free hearing test
- Lead Generation for Insurance & Financial Products. We gather data from people looking for insurances, policies and tailored financial products.
- E-commerce Campaigns via CSS Partners & other Comparison Shopping Services. We only work with the best CSS partners, guaranteeing the most effective tools and providing tailored and transparent solutions.
CSS, in particular, has been one of those verticals where we have invested the most. Today we are helping 80+ advertisers to increase their incremental reach and sales. The good results we are getting strongly rely on the combination of two factors: (a) scientific approach and (b) technological implementation. Thanks to those, we are able to deliver high-quality traffic shifting the effort from low performing activities to those which are showing positive results. Simply injecting our technology and methodology we manage to unleash incremental return on investment.
Where do you think is the affiliate space heading to in the next year and what are the main market disruptions?
Due to its own nature, the affiliate world has always been open to embrace innovation. As an example, we can consider how fast it was to recognize the CSS opportunity and immediately implement this channel to contribute to advertisers growth. The challenges that we are facing today are different, though. We need to understand how to deal with an online world which will be less and less cookie-driven, nevertheless, data will become even more important. Marketers have to think about how to redesign their strategies in a place where third party information is becoming less relevant. Those who will be able to leverage a thorough and structured audience strategy will succeed. First-party data will be the core of the marketing industry we’ll see in the next 3-5 years. It’s hard to already forecast in which ways those first-party data will contribute to reshape the affiliate industry, but if I can just put in my two cents. I think that time is not so far.
What is one fun fact about Booster Box?
Booster Box headquarters are in the middle of nowhere in Tuscany, Italy. So close your eyes and imagine the stereotype: olive trees, wine, nice hills and the sea a few mins away…yes there’s exactly where we are! You would definitely not imagine building a tech company in such an unconventional location but it would have been too easy to do that in London, New York, or Tel Aviv….so we figured we could spice things up a little:)
How is your company different than a traditional affiliate partner? Can you elaborate on your unique technology?
Our technology relies on the overlap between what we know about the business and the product and what we know about the customer, meaning we try to find opportunities for bringing the right users to ultimately buy a product/ sign up to a service/sign up to a form by trying to spot them whenever they are searching or browsing the web. How? As we said back in Google days ‘Know the users, know the magic, connect the two.’
Thank you, Gianluca, for the interview!
