In this non-exclusive partnership, we are acting as co-seller, not as an agent. We spoke to Alexander Krause, Director Partnership Development, about our new collaboration.
Alex, first of all, congrats getting Xiaomi on board with us! How did this partnership come about?
As always, signing a new publisher takes time and team effort – the New Partnership team could not have done it without the tech integration miracles performed by our friends from ad tech! Also, a big thank you to Katrin Müller and her team for their outstanding job obtaining fantastic press coverage 💐.
We actually started talking to Xiaomi at the beginning of 2022. Before announcing a partnership on a big scale like we just did, we always need to ensure that we can deliver, hence we first kicked-off working for Xiaomi quietly in Germany + Spain beginning of 2023 and added Italy and France a couple months later.
What was the biggest challenge you were faced with in the process? (Insights? Do you have an example you can share internally?)
The negotiation process with Asian publishers is often a bit trickier than with European publishers. We had to invest a lot of time discussing the commercials and the contract in detail. But, in the end we found a solution which works well for both sides.
Now, that we have a lift-off: What are our benefits?
Although the traffic we generate with Xiaomi is not nearly as big as the one with Samsung or LG, it’s a great addition to our existing CTV portfolio – with one of the largest OEMs globally. As Xiaomi has inventory across multiple of our core markets, there is further potential to onboard additional countries such as the UK.
Tell us more about the inventory and main targeting options. What do we know about their audience?
Xiaomi offers suitable inventory for any brand looking for premium digital video content. Most of their inventory consists of news, entertainment, sport and kids channels (premium only, no user-generated-content). There are 8-10 min of ads per hour and targeting is possible by IAB categories.
Users are 75% male, 25% female and 75% of them are between 20 and 39 years old.
Now that the message is out, what are the next steps?
As already mentioned, we would like to expand the collaboration with Xiaomi to further countries based on demand driven by the RTL AdAlliance sales teams.
Additionally, it is also very important to address new market needs such as content object or TCF [Transparency & Consent Framework] which is now in the expert hands of our colleagues from the Partnership Management team. Partners who do not support these industry standards risk missing out on programmatic revenues, so we always try to promote adoption of these initiatives. We are very happy to be working with them on the supply side: A big thank you to this team as well 💐!
