Welcome to our Publisher Spotlight! Could you please introduce yourself?

I’m Alastair Campbell, the Chief Growth Officer for RedBrain. I’m responsible for working directly with retailers, partners and affiliates to explain the benefits of using the RedBrain Comparison Shopping Service to reach new customers and increase sales.

 

Nice to meet you Alastair, could you tell us more about RedBrain and the company’s core business values?

RedBrain is a Comparison-Shopping Service, or CSS. It’s a Google Premium Partner, and it’s the biggest in Europe. We generated £1 billion in sales for retailers in 2019, working with our great partners and affiliate networks including Webgains.

Our core values are about offering incremental sales to retailers. RedBrain campaigns don’t impact on any activity that a retailer might carry out themselves or through an ad agency.

And because we use a Cost Per Action (CPA) model, we’re putting our own money on the table. A retailer doesn’t actually have to pay us until we’ve generated a sale.

 

Sounds great Alastair, so what would you say are the biggest benefits for an advertiser working with your company?

The biggest benefits are very simple. We generate sales with no cost to the advertiser unless there’s a transaction.

We have extensive experience with Google Shopping, more than one billion products from retailers in our database and automated AI systems to match consumers with products at exactly the point where they’re most willing to buy.

Data from more than 15,000 retailers, and the transaction data from millions of purchases enables us to accurately predict when it’s the right time to bid for a shopping advert.

 

So, Alastair following on from this could you tell us more about your audience and what types of advertisers do you work best with?

RedBrain works very well with any retailer which sells a physical product delivered to the home. We have extensive experience across more retail sectors, and we’ve seen exceptional success in fashion, tech, home and garden products.

Recently, we’ve seen an increase in conversions and sales for software sold as a retail product online. This has worked extremely well for both computer games, and business or productivity software such as Microsoft Office.

Basically, if you sell your products online and ship them to someone’s home, then RedBrain can help you as a retailer.

The main industry sectors where we don’t operate are automotive, travel or hospitality.

 

When would you say then is the best time of year for you as a business?

Any big seasonal event is always an interesting time at RedBrain. Obviously, there is always a desire from retailers to drive up impressions and add more sales. We also see big peaks in the volume of traffic to our own comparison website.

The increases in customers and sales also reveals fascinating data about buying habits and purchases. We know that most people are planners and tend to research and purchase quite far in advance of a big event or holiday. That includes Christmas and Valentine’s Day.

For example, Valentine’s Day shoppers start to ramp up 1 week before February 14th every year and peak on the 13th February. And we can see how the actual type of product being bought changes over time. So, it is really fascinating to see the shift from consumers planning ahead to then thinking “What can I still order in time the day before Valentine’s Day?”

 

That is very interesting information and definitely gets us thinking about next year’s Valentine’s Day campaigns! So, can you tell us what makes RedBrain an exciting company to work for?

It is super exciting at RedBrain as we have doubled in size year-on-year. That includes going from a team of 10 to almost 50 people in the space of 24 months.

The passion in the business comes from a complete focus on adding value to retailers. And from working very closely with Webgains and others so that in partnership we can all benefit from increased retail sales.

One of the most interesting parts of a business based on the CPA model is working very closely to add value to retailers. It’s not a simple ‘sell and forget’ process, but really is a very genuine partnership.

 

That is great to hear that you’ve grown so quickly in the last couple of years, to go alongside this does RedBrain have any more exciting plans coming up in the next 12 months you can tell us about?

We have several exciting projects which are scheduled for delivery within the next 12 months.

However, due to the current pandemic crisis, we are currently focusing on customers using our existing services and working very closely with affiliate networks to help online retailers who need to find those incremental sales.

We can help retailers online spend more money when they are actually achieving sales, which is crucial right now.

I’m sure that once we see the current COVID-19 curve start to flatten, we’ll be in a position to talk in more detail about our new projects.

 

Agreed, and we look forward to hearing more about your new projects in due course. And so, in your opinion, where do you think the Affiliate space is heading to in 2020 and what would you say are the main market disruptions?

COVID has completely changed the plans for all businesses, certainly for the foreseeable future.

In the affiliate space, it has increased the collaboration as affiliate networks such as Webgains, and a CSS like RedBrain, work together incredibly closely to help support retailers and drive more retailer sales.

 

Is there anything else you would like our customers to know?

What would be great for Webgains retailers to know is that we are totally available to help them.

If you’re not exactly sure how a CSS works, or you want more clarification about the CPA model, I’m (or one of the team if you prefer!) available to take any call needed to go through the options. We are not interested in trying to offer a hard sell as we know we can work with retailers through Webgains help and that it will benefit all of us. Especially at this particularly challenging time.

 

Thanks Alastair, and finally one last question, what is one fun fact about your business?

As our business continues to grow so quickly it’s easy to find you lose touch with your colleagues.

Our CEO has introduced internal “speed dating” to let us continually learn about each other and stay connected. It’s a fun way to learn more about the people you work with, and it helps us collaborate more effectively, especially during busy or challenging times. Machine Learning has never been this much fun 🙂

 

That sounds like a great idea, and a lot of fun! Thanks again Alastair for taking the time to talk to us today

To learn more about CSS & Google Shopping with RedBrain, check out the link below – https://www.loom.com/share/b699447ce14a4e8cae99264c581dd24e