Get To Know Vytas Paukstys, Founder And CEO Of Eskimi

What’s up Vytas? Firstly, can you share with us a little bit about yourself and your company?

Thanks for asking. Well, I am the Founder and CEO of Eskimi, which is a programmatic and data company actively working in Asia, Africa, and Middle Eastern regions. I founded the company 12 years ago and it has been an amazing journey through more than 30 different products, tens of countries together with such an amazing team. Throughout the years we have managed to grow in a fast and changing environment of telecommunications, mobile, and marketing with hard work.

What’s Eskimi up to right now?

At Eskimi, we strive to create unique solutions for brands, in specific industries like telecom, FMCG, automotive. Since last 5 years, our strong focus is on large mobile markets, which usually take place in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. We launched a successful chat platform that became one of the largest social products in Africa with more than 25 million members.

We are building an ad-tech solution, a great combination of highest reach, data and creative solutions. Our product offering consists of DSP (Demand Side Platform), which allows brands to buy digital advertising through more than 40 supply sources and more than 2 million sites and apps worldwide; DMP (Data Management Platform), where we have profiled more than 1 billion consumers and can segment them into relevant audiences for brands; and rich media and dynamic creative suite, where we offer brands amazing rich media and dynamic creative to increase engagement and brand recall.

Being a tech company, we built our product stack in-house which allows us to be very flexible, always offer innovative solutions at great cost to our clients.

We are happy to have a talented development team members in Dhaka who help us build all those great products.

How has 2019 been personally for you and Eskimi so far?

In this first quarter of the year, the advertising world has been waking up. As a result, we are usually focused on product development, training and building strategies together with our clients and partners. If compared, till now, this year we saw more progress than the last year, which of course is great.

Eskimi is doing extremely well in Bangladesh, congratulations on that. We know this might sound a little bit off limit but we have to do this anyway so here goes. What’s the ultimate secret behind the success?

Ahahaha. There is only one secret behind our success and that is, undoubtedly, hard work. Focusing on the goals, we have been working really hard for years. We have a great team in Dhaka who made it all happen – our business, client service and development teams. I’m very proud of what they have achieved and I always promote talent. You can find that some of our international partners even decided to establish offices as well.

From the product side, we build solutions for specific industries, and then, we can offer something which is not generic, but really beneficial to brands.

Telecoms use our telco data and dashboard products, where we have built the audiences in the way telecoms group and target their audiences. We know people who use multi-SIM devices, we can group customers by their data consumption or 3G/4G use. We would know that a customer left one telecom for another and the telecom using our platform can target these consumers with a win-back promotion. Based on our data you can retain up to 20% consumers which is a very profitable marketing investment for the telecom client.

We have built a video solution where you can achieve 50-60% video complete rates compared to the low tens in industry standard. And FMCG brands enjoy our rich media suite, where they can achieve engagement rates of 15% instead of a 0.5% CTR. It is all about building great experiences and targeting the right consumers.

Our anti-fraud solution ensures that all the KPIs are real and non-inflated.

Digital vertical, where do you think this is heading when it comes to Bangladesh?

Talking about Bangladesh, I believe, the two words that will define it would be “smart growth”. The market is growing, new segments like banking are starting to discover the benefits of digital. At the same time, companies are getting smarter and start to measure more – understand what are video complete rates, ad fraud, brand safety, rich media, etc. This is a great trend and this will just accelerate growth if the investment is channelled towards the right KPIs.

And we are happy that all these KPIs can be delivered well in programmatic. So, more and more brands are shifting money towards programmatic.

Worldwide the shift to programmatic has already happened, but the brands are still fighting with brand safety (big issues happened with Google, YouTube, etc.), fraud, and attribution. Quality is getting more attention. Keywords like programmatic direct are getting more traction. I believe, these trends will also shape Bangladesh, but after some time. However, we try to educate our brands in workshops or public events like #Eskimitalks, so we would all save time and jump into the conclusions of the European or US lessons.

Since you are one of the industry key players, how do you see the overall marketing sector in Bangladesh?

I think it is well balanced with a good number of strong local players and international companies. Competition is great to grow the whole market, educate the clients and for all the players to build better products while enjoying a fair game.

In the next ten years, what is your vision regarding Eskimi and Bangladesh market?

As I mentioned, growth is happening and we are happy to ride the wave. Very hard to predict such a long period, but I think if we follow the trends of other markets, I see in the next 4-5 years Bangladesh adopting digital marketing to at least 20% of the marketing money going to digital and this will be a huge jump from current 5-7%.

Besides, all of this growth will be powered by machine learning and algorithms, which means it will be programmatic. Publishers need to adopt this change, start creating audiences and data, even outdoor will become programmatic as we have already launched some outdoor programmatic pilots in other markets.

Anything you wish to share with the readers, especially for marketing enthusiasts?

I’d like to invite everyone to learn every day and embrace change as digital marketing is growing and with the right use, it has great potential within your organization.

What is the best way to contact you?

Our team is always there and they are the experts of the local market and local needs. But if anyone wants to get in touch, they can do so via Linkedin.