MarTech Interview with Sven Lubek of WeQ on Mobile Performance

WeQ drives user acquisition and engagement to deliver mobile performance and branding campaigns at a global scale. Our team of experts enable clients to achieve their goals by combining a client-centric approach with purpose-built, state-of-the-art technology. We deliver to our clients in over 180 countries across different verticals: gaming, mobility, m-commerce, travel and more. 

As a mobile advertising company, WeQ is offering a unique approach that balances data with human intelligence – thus rendering us a unique player in the mobile advertising industry. The motto "Built by experts, powered by technology" is embedded within every facet of the organization, from campaign management to optimization.

 What is WeQ’s value proposition and competitive advantage?

WeQ is all about achieving measurable results for clients worldwide and our proprietary machine learning technology is at the core of WeQ. It enables us to deliver optimal results at a fraction of the cost, according to specific KPIs. WeQ’s proprietary technology is continually developed by an in-house team of machine learning experts, developers, and data scientists – in order to deliver the most targeted, optimized, and scalable mobile advertising solutions. This allows our clients to focus on what they do best: building great apps and growing successful brands.

Reflecting on WeQ’s success in APAC – what enabled it?

We attribute our recent success in South Korea and Japan to our dedicated team of account managers, who follow a hands-on consultative approach that is tailored to the market needs for each client. There is a strong consultation element, as we advise our clients based on the experience we have gained from previous campaigns in other GEOs. We enjoy sharing knowledge of GEOs and give them advice on how to run campaigns in Western markets and ultimately help them grow. We have a tailor-made and personalized approach at WeQ so we don’t just press some buttons: we are there on a personal level to help our clients develop mobile marketing strategies every step of the way, together, as a team.

Our APAC team consists of members who have local expertise and speak the languages natively to enable their partners to reach their goals, both in APAC and globally. This combined with our proprietary technology for successful campaign management and optimization enables us to stand out in APAC’s mobile advertising market landscape.

New office in Japan: In March 2019, we opened a new office in Tokyo. We opened our office in Japan to help agencies, app developers and networks to grow their apps. We want to work together to drive user acquisition and engagement via tailored mobile performance and branding campaigns. We have already been running offers from diverse verticals including gaming, dating and shopping. As Japan is one of the global leaders in technology and the number of mobile users, we believe that there is a high potential for verticals like finance, entertainment and lifestyle.

Looking Ahead – What’s next for WeQ in 2019

What are the trends that are driving the industry today, and how is WeQ meeting those needs?

Influencer Marketing: Influencer marketing is booming with a projected $10 billion to be invested in endorsed ads in 2019. So, in March 2019 Elena Kutsopal and Olga Wese joined forces as Managing Directors of WeQ INFLUENCERS.

We launched WeQ INFLUENCERS to leverage our market expertise and deliver the most impactful and scalable influencer campaigns for global brands. We can now help brands and app developers engage with high quality consumers across a wide array of key markets. We’ve created a unique and effective way for advertisers to reach users where they’re most engaged, unlock new marketing significant channels (including YouTube, Instagram & TikTok) and maximize return on ad spend in influencer marketing. By leveraging influencers’ personal brands and connecting their communities with products across multiple social networks, we can deliver true engagement and transfer the loyalty from the influencer onto the product.

Gaming: We see a huge opportunity in mobile gaming. Hyper-casual games have seen unprecedented growth over the past year and the market is valued to be in the region of $2 billion to $2.5 billion in annual revenue. We are looking to branch out into gaming in Q2 and it will be a heavy focus for us in Q3 We are in the process of investing in talent and looking potentially at game studios. We want to help them publish and grow their mobile games and we will be willing to invest into new partnerships and additional gaming projects. We will be revealing more details soon.

What are the opportunities that you see in the future of the company?

APAC: Since APAC continues to be a top tier market for WeQ’s mobile advertising activities, we also have our sights set on expanding our footprint further within the region. We are continuing to expand our network in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Korea. With our newly established presence in Japan via the office in Tokyo, we aim to strengthen our existing relationships with local partners and expand our business reach.

What are the challenges?

Adapting Fast: To be successful as an entrepreneur in any field, you must see problems as opportunities. This rings mostly true with mobile advertising, where there is a constant need for innovation. Working in this industry does not only mean that we must be aware of the trends, but as a business we also must work in an agile way to ensure that changes are continuously made to stay ahead of the curve. The challenge is also the most exciting part: adapting fast to improve our offering and doing it well.

Meeting our clients’ needs: This goes together with the other major challenge, which is meeting our clients’ needs daily from campaign management to optimization. We get around this by working closely with clients to understand their perspective and needs. For example, with mobile ad fraud being the biggest pain point for advertisers, our team worked closely with clients to understand their needs and perspective. They then took this feedback on to develop a comprehensive in-house fraud prevention solution that addresses the current compliance needs of the mobile marketing industry.

Developing Bespoke Solutions: We pride ourselves on developing our bespoke solutions with a tailor-made approach. This ensures that the needs of our clients are met, as there is no one-size-fits-all, so this is always front of mind for us.

What are additional key trends that you see impacting the advertising industry significantly over the next 12 months?

Mobile Fraud: Rather than “trend” we’d speak about the major problem faced by our industry – mobile advertising fraud – which is driving the need for a solution. Mobile ad fraud is growing at an alarming pace, with rates nearly doubling since 2017. We developed a solution to help us protecting clients’ campaigns called WeQ SHIELD and launched it in November 2018. Seeing as one of the key impediments to fighting fraud is the lack of unified benchmarks, WeQ’s compliance team has worked closely with clients to understand their perspective and needs for fraud mitigation. We have also gathered an expert team of data scientists and BI specialists who use machine learning to comb through hundreds of millions of events and data points daily. As a result, WeQ SHIELD is based on AI technology and unlike other manual or static automated systems on the market today, it uses machine learning to constantly adapt our anti-fraud detection mechanisms. This uniquely empowers WeQ’s team to take immediate action in the increasingly complex and growing fight against fraud.

Brand safety: The other trend or need driving the industry today is brand safety. Organizations now need to encourage cross-channel marketing, so there is more emphasis placed on brand safety than ever before. At WeQ, we collected several hundred billion data points from our partners and aggregated them in our in-house database. Based on the learnings from these statistics WeQ Technology can make informed decisions to protect our customers. We work exclusively with premium advertising inventory and offer our customers full transparency, by giving them access to the various advertising placements up to the individual publisher level.

MTA Features Desk: Thank you, Sven for sharing your insights on WeQ’s journey. We hope to talk to you again soon.

About Sven Lubek:

Sven is a serial entrepreneur, having founded over 25 companies — including WeQ, Browsergames, Sven Lubek's the ADEX, Onlineversicherung.de — across 15 different industries, with a range of these firms benefiting from extremely high profits. He has acquired over 20 years of experience in building and leading high-performance digital and mobile marketing companies.

About WeQ:

WeQ drives user acquisition and engagement to deliver mobile performance and branding campaigns. Headquartered in Berlin with an office in San Francisco, it has a global footprint in Tokyo and Seoul. WeQ’s experts enable clients to achieve their goals by combining a client-centric approach with purpose-built, state-of-the-art technology across 180 markets.

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