We began the project with research on Pixazza and other online advertising industries and market trends. In the project, we focused mainly on the following parameters.
1. Business Model
2. Competitors
3. SWOT analysis
4. Future Trends
During the research phase, though we had access to several information about Pixazza, we felt short of deeper insights about the company. We wrote to Pixazza with brief information about our findings and assumptions. We asked for help from the Top Management to help us gather more information about the company. Finally, we were lucky to get in touch with the Chief Revenue Officer, Mr Chas Edwards who was more than willing to help us with the report. We fixed a time for the interview on December 20th, 2010, waited with excitement until today when we finally got an opportunity to talk to him. We interviewed Mr Chas over the telephone for a good 50 minutes. Mr Chas helped us answer all our questions regarding the company. The best outcome of this interview was that we received great insights from one of the key decision maker of a growing business.
IE Team: What are the main cost components for your Company?
IE Team: What is the reason behind your business model of having "Experts" whereas your competitor such as Gumgum.com do not?
Pixazza: The "Digital recognition algorithm" used by several players only broadly identifies what is In-image technology. This algorithm is supplemented by an algorithm created by Pixazza which is the differentiating factor from the competitors. But this model is still difficult to get granular detail that is required for product detection and be 100% correct (e.g. brand of watch). The "Experts" on board are not professionals but instead the proficient shoppers in each product category. We do not use expensive professionals but different pool of proficient shoppers for each category. Sometimes, when it is extremely difficult to identify a brand, the experts use a special technology using attributes of the product and tag the product that looks closest to the image.
IE Team: Can you provide us information regarding the revenue and profitability of the company?
Pixazza: The information is yet to be obtained.
IE Team: How do you pay your "Experts"?
Pixazza: We pay the "Experts" upfront for his/her work on tagging images. This would avoid confusion of the "Expert" putting effort on tagging and the customer does not purchase the corresponding product.
IE Team: How do you select your "Experts"?
Pixazza: Experts apply to Pixazza and Pixazza determines if the Experts are sufficiently qualified and subscribe to thecode of professionalism. Experts are then trained to help make sure that the tagging is done in a way that follows code and the moderator will communicate guidelines to the experts (e.g. if a celebrity has recently died he/she will not be tagged).
Pixazza: Pixazza's technology is deployed to hundreds of websites. Pixazza observes which sites get right traffic and helps determine the queue of images to be tagged. The order in which they are tagged is based on the popularity of publisher's websites that are to be tagged.
IE Team: Do you have tie ups with popular brands?
Pixazza: Pixazza has relationship with a number of online retailers across the globe and is now beginning to build relationships with popular brands.
IE Team: What in your opinion is the biggest strength in Pixazza's business process?
Pixazza: The biggest strength of Pixazza is its technology which clearly differentiates it from its competitors. Our competitors use only algorithms. However, Pixazza uses a human qualification layer to the algorithm technology.
IE Team: What is the strategy you implement in accelerating customer purchase?
Pixazza: We follow popular editorials online and during the occurrence of an event, we try to tag these latest images after the event and drive a customer purchase. For eg: After the Soccer World Cup, when a huge traffic is expected on viewing soccer images, we try to tag these images to sports products in order to drive the consumer in buying sports goods via Pixazza.
IE Team: How do you plan to establish "Pixazza" as a global firm in the future?
What can we anticipate from Pixazza in the future?
Pixazza: We are establishing tie ups with "Daily Mail" in the UK and "Times of India" news journal in India. We are currently focusing on English speaking regions.
We have launched "Pixazza light" to give publishers the ability to add advertisements to the bottom of their images while they are in queue awaiting Pixazza's services. For eg: Working with Goal.com, small ads can be accessed from the bottom of the website's images. We plan to enrich image qualities and interaction experience rather than diversifying products.
IE Team: Who do you consider to be your main competitors?
Pixazza: Google is largest advertiser in terms of using logic to link between websites. Currently they are focused on text ads like the "AdSense" but they are investing in image space too.
IE Team: How has the company grown over the past 2 years?
Pixazza: The year 2008-09 was focused on developing a strong platform. 2010 is the first year of aggressive deployment of technology. Year by year comparison may not be that helpful. But talking about 2010, Revenue in Q2 doubled that of Q1, Q3 again doubled that of Q2 and Q4 looks to do the same over Q3.
IE Team: What is Pixazza's mechanism to improve customer satisfaction?
Pixazza: We receive direct feedback from users and from publishers who have feedback mechanisms on their own websites which are in turn passed onto us.
With this interview, we gained a deeper knowledge about the strong position of Pixazza in the online advertising industry and also obtained information that would otherwise not be found anywhere on the internet.
I really enjoyed working with my wonderful team of seven on this project and look forward to work on more challenges together during the course.
Good one...
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