Insider's View: Ad Tech & Multicultural Marketing Q&A with Niklas Nikolaidis

Multiculturalism brings with it a number of opportunities — access to specific skills and knowledge, economic growth, and a chance to discover other cultures, to name a few. For advertisers and marketers, it also opens the door to a niche market that, when approached correctly, can be enormously rewarding.

To explore that opportunity, we sat down with Niklas Nikolaidis — someone who understands multicultural advertising from both sides of the equation.

Niklas is the founder of Joinville, an independent trading desk specializing in multicultural and global online advertising. You can connect with him on LinkedIn and follow him on Twitter.

1. Can you tell us a bit about your background and expertise in the ad tech industry?

I worked as a Marketing Manager for various US and UK companies, running SEM and display campaigns from 2004 onwards. After doing that for a couple of years with increasingly larger budgets, I saw a clear need for a niche digital entity built around the skills I'd picked up.

In 2008, I left my day job and started a digital agency and affiliate network selling ad space through CPA deals. I thought affiliate marketing was what every advertiser wanted. Boy, was I wrong! 😄

As client campaign briefs grew more complex and global, it became obvious that direct media buys weren't delivering the results and ROI clients needed. So around 2011, I started looking into programmatic advertising as a way to pinpoint the users and inventory we were after. Google brought us in as a certified partner for AdX that same year, and that's where I started trading. Back then, DSP UIs were breaking constantly and geo-targeting was unreliable at best. Thankfully, that's improved dramatically.

Since 2011, I've led a team of media traders and yield managers optimizing on both sides of the auction. Working the buy and sell side simultaneously gives a unique perspective on the relationship between buyers and sellers in the programmatic marketplace — we also monetize publisher inventory by aggregating different SSPs alongside direct advertiser relationships.

To simplify vertical audience targeting, we built our own audience platform, Mundo, and integrated it on top of several DSPs. It now has hundreds of users across all continents.

2. What specifically does Joinville do, and how does it fit into the broader online advertising picture?

Joinville's programmatic buying arm helps clients and agencies purchase media, execute campaigns, and optimize targeting toward multicultural (ethnic) audiences. Those buys are facilitated via DSPs and individual direct site purchases.

We started as a programmatic trading desk for multicultural advertising in 2011 after seeing growing demand from companies and organizations trying to reach fast-expanding multicultural communities. At the time, programmatic inventory was accessible only through ad exchanges like DoubleClick AdX or US-based DSPs — and those DSPs had very limited non-US inventory, since they were almost entirely focused on US impressions.

To scale client campaigns quickly, we built out databases of high-performing sites, apps, and video platforms suited to multicultural advertising, alongside publisher marketplaces for specific audiences.

In short, Joinville targets hard-to-find vertical, cultural (ethnic) audiences and serves them with the right message in the right context.

3. What are some of the biggest challenges companies face when expanding their advertising into new countries and cultures — and how can they overcome the initial hurdles?

One interesting pattern is that internet users in certain countries — Turkey and Poland, for instance — are notably reluctant to act on ads. Click rates and engagement levels tend to run lower across the board in those markets, and that's been consistent throughout my time in this industry. Culture, history, and country-specific traditions all play a role when trying to penetrate certain markets.

Color usage can also be surprisingly sensitive. In some Asian countries, yellow is associated with illness. In several Latin American countries, red carries a historical association with colonization.

These are easy-to-miss details that can quietly derail a go-to-market strategy. Running user testing before launch is a straightforward way to catch these issues before they become costly.

4. What have been the biggest changes you've seen in online advertising since 2011?

Ad tech overall has improved dramatically. Transparency has increased considerably across the board; deal ID functionality is now streamlined between platforms. Combating ad fraud has become a recognized priority — though, frankly, it deserves even more attention than it currently gets. Machine learning is becoming mainstream in reporting, automation, and targeting.

On the supply side, header bidding has been the most significant structural shift — it's paving the way for a unified auction and eliminating the manual steps that previously cluttered the auction process.

Looking further ahead, blockchain technology is starting to emerge as a credible option for identity management and user verification.

5. How does the multicultural marketing market in the US compare to Europe? Is one outpacing the other, and why?

The US ad tech sector and programmatic ecosystem is, in my view, one to two years ahead of the rest of the world — both in the raw QPS horsepower required to participate in the market and in overall maturity for data-driven media buying.

The same applies to multicultural marketing. The sheer market size is a major factor: approximately 120 million people in the US are considered multicultural, which is roughly three times larger than the equivalent population in Europe. As a result, data sets, audience lists, and campaign requirements are considerably more sophisticated in the US than elsewhere.