An interview with Engagement Labs (
TSX: V.EL,
Forum) CEO, Bryan Segal
Now that you have had the opportunity since your appointment in December 2014 to survey the market landscape, how do you see Engagement Labs and its future within this space?
For me, when I came on board in December coming from ComScore, I knew that the power of digital and social was really strong, but what I learned over the past couple of months is the amount of effort and the amount of love and passion there is out there for social media by agencies, advertisers and publishers. I knew how big the trend was on the consumer side from ComScore, but what I learned was how valuable social was as a tool for these different players, whether it be on the paid or organic side. I think it shows there’s huge investment in what people are seeing on social and how to connect with this audience.
Now, six months in, I’m even more excited than I was originally for the opportunity we have. Because I came from the data world, it’s great to see how the company has progressed not only on the data side but also on the insights and analytics side. With this strong core competency, not only have we been able to drive data to the platform, but also provide important insights to the businesses we serve. What we’re providing is hand-in-glove to the industry as publishers, agencies and advertisers embrace this trend allowing businesses to take advantage of these insights and really guide their decision-making process.
How has G. Scott Paterson’s appointment as Chairman impacted Engagement Labs direction and what skills/experience does he bring to the table that will assist Engagement Labs in achieving its goals? Who are the other key members of Engagement’s board?
Scott Paterson has been an amazing visionary for us. Obviously if you look back at the company 18 months ago, he was responsible for finding and investing in this technology. He’s put a ton of his own money into this company. I think some of his most important aspects are his ability to tell our story, and how that story and who he tells it to, really links into what we’re doing as a company. Obviously Scott has a history with his work at Yorkton Securities and the finance world, but I think his benefit to us has really been in his recent history where he was founder of CHUM TV, his work with Lionsgate, chairing Symbility and his ability as a venture capitalist and a financier. All of this has been incredibly important to us, our growth and being able to build our story in the global marketplace.
As far as the rest of the Board, let me point out, there’s a difference between investing in a company and investing your time in a company. I think our Board has gone beyond simply giving up time to go to meetings and have had a real passion and urgency for the business. Rob Dickson, our Vice-chair, has been instrumental in almost everything we do. He has a massive Rolodex when it comes to contacts in North America and beyond. Sheldon Pollack is another big player. He’s been instrumental in helping us drive decisions at the right time. Then there’s Marc Saltzman, a well-known writer, has benefited us greatly with his reach and his ideas on how we can grow our platform. Ed King, who used to be the Chairman of CIBC Wood Gundy, his knowledge and fingerprint on what we do on the advertising side of our business has been extremely instrumental.
So it’s not just a board that meets once in a blue moon and hands down their ideas from the top of the mountain. Each member is deeply involved on a day-to-day basis and they have their finger on the pulse of what’s going on in our business.
What major milestones/performance benchmarks have you been able to hit since your appointment?
You know, we've have some extremely lofty goals at Engagement Labs and I like to say every time we hit a milestone that it’s just one step up the mountain of success. We’ve made a lot of encouraging moves forward during my time. We’ve raised a great amount of capital, we’ve cleaned up the books, are making sure we’re spending money in the right way and we’ve made some strategic changes on the staff side. We’ve also made the strategic decision to invest in places that our clients are looking for answers – I believe that’s one of the areas I’m most proud of. We’ve also made enhancements to our product; we’ve added new tools, engines and features to enrich the experience for our clients.
In addition to that, on the marketing side, we’ve made a lot of headway. With our goal of becoming the benchmark for social media measurement, our marketing team has been ramping up our media presence, getting us into publications like, AdWeek, Forbes and Marketing Magazine on multiple occasions. We’ve been in hundreds of dailies, some of the biggest around the globe: Variety Magazine, ABC News, USA Today and Yahoo Finance. Creating awareness around our story for publishers and agencies to read has really helped in generating leads and extending our name as the de facto place to go for social media measurement.
Getting clients is one thing, retaining them is another, how has Engagement Labs upped its client services game recently? What other key players have been put into place to fill out Engagement Labs executive management team?
I can think of a several really big appointments we’ve made and I’ll talk about three in particular that I think are most important, not most important in regards to people, but in regards to the position and what we as a company are trying to achieve with our clients. Recently we brought Jesse Abrams on board. Jesse is a young superstar in the digital and social industry with a great depth of knowledge; I’m sure that one day I will be working for him somewhere. He was instrumental all the work General Mills did on the digital and social media side. He was in charge of agency relationships, building their strategy and seeing through implementation. Jesse will be our frontman with clients to ensure that we leverage tailored strategies, as every company and industry is unique. That way we can make sure they best utilize our data and our services to enable us to bring better ROI and effectiveness to their social media efforts.
The second, and I want to stress these are not in order of importance, is marketing. If you look into any of the major portals and search engines like Google, I think you will discover that we’ve been very active on the press front. This follows a philosophy that I learned at ComScore of the importance of building the visibility of your brand in the industry and Jessica Dell’Aquila has been another major piece to the puzzle. She’s come on board and upped our marketing game a million fold. What we’ve been able to accomplish in terms of industry rankings, banking, travel, beer, quick service restaurants and universities, has been amazing. I mean here we are a small company out of Toronto garnering global impressions in front of millions of unique visitors on a daily basis both online and in print; it’s pretty phenomenal. We’re growing our currency in the marketplace and now people are calling us directly to get our input and use our data.
Then the last really key hire is Virginia Pino, who is our Vice-President of Insights and Analytics. I think of all the things we want to enhance and move forward with, insights and analytics in a data company are extremely imperative, because, raw data on its own does not tell a story or guide business decisions, insights and analytics do. There’s a huge gap in the market, for companies that take data and deliver it in the form of insights that enable companies to make decisions. As we head down that path to fill that need, our insights and analytics team headed by Virginia, with her experience in the market, her knowledge and understanding of market research outside of social, is going to help us drive our value add further. She will help us provide a highly effective insight and analytical package to our clients while talking a language they can understand.
Despite recording a 177% increase in revenues in Q1 2015 over the same period in 2014 and announcing multiple contract wins, Engagement Labs has been facing some challenges in the market in regards to share price, what do you think may have been the contributing factors? Do you think the downward pressure is coming to an end?
Being an insider to the company it is hard for me to speak to that, but at the end of the day, this isn’t a short term effort. Success will be measured in the long run and I believe in our long-term vision. Yes, equity is very important but to achieve that state, we need to continue driving top line growth in revenue and control our costs by making smart business decisions through strategic partnerships and key hires. I am very confident that if we continue with client wins and drive the right parts of our business then SP will follow. I don’t know if there’s been any specific business-related reason for the recent downturn in SP, but I do know that the Venture Exchange has been feeling some pressure as a whole.
At the end of the day, I am still extremely confident on where our business is at and where we are going as a company. We’re showing strong growth and client wins, which I think is what we as a company should be concentrating on now, and over time our SP is going to reflect that.
What milestones can investors look forward to in 2015? Will there be any more financing in the near-term, if so, when and why?
For me, the milestones will include continual growth on the revenue side, knocking down some of these new logos and driving further into the logos we already have. Partnerships or other channels where we can grow will also be important. We want to partner with great people and we want to build a great sales team so we have a direct channel into other platforms as ways to drive value into different operations.
I know this may sound a little vague and we do want to drive ahead with as much transparency as possible and we will be publishing press releases as we go along but I’m sure the investors will understand that some things we want to keep close to our chest until the right moment.
FULL DISCLOSURE: Engagement Labs is a Stockhouse Publishing client.