Congratulations on your series A funding round. What will you be doing with the new fund raise? More product development? Overseas expansion?

We are planning to open a number offices globally to service new demand. This will enable Struq to bring Ad Personalization to advertisers and agency campaigns across the US and Europe.

We are also planning to allocate more financial resources to innovation and product development. We are one of a few businesses globally who have built a complete ad technology stack in-house (DSP, bid optimisation engine, recommendation engine and dynamic creative optimisation), which has allowed us to deliver performance and ad personalisation to our clients. That is credit to the incredible team we have at Struq. A sizeable portion of our investment will be used to hire exceptional talent who will be focused on innovating for the benefit of clients and consumers.

Retargeting companies have been incredibly successful in display. How are Struq going to remain competitive as more companies seek to own the bottom-of-the-funnel budget?

The real time advertising market is evolving extremely fast, and there are many success stories we note and respect amongst our peers. Our real competitive strength comes from understanding the behavioural patterns which makes users likely to purchase. This enables Struq to deliver relevant, personalised video and display ads to consumers as well as post click performance for advertisers.

We have also invested heavily in building out a talented team within the company. Genuine, competitive advantage is being able to have a team that can adapt and innovate as fast as the ever changing needs of the market. At Struq we will continue to seek out the best talent to meet and exceed the evolving needs of our clients and consumers.

Does Struq need to move more up the purchase funnel, and look at prospecting instead of retargeting a client’s data set?

Yes – and we offer this now. We apply our core piece of technology – understanding the behavioural patterns which makes users likely to purchase – across the purchase funnel for advertisers.

Struq’s Ad Personalization platform enables an advertiser to persuade an audience at any stage of the purchase funnel. This extends beyond retargeting to delivering personalised ads to prospective users at the top of the funnel.

Advertisers using Struq across the purchase funnel benefit from unique insight into which combination of ad elements, products, placements and content persuaded users to perform an advertiser’s desired action. This insight provided by Struq provides advertisers with information on what persuaded a user to buy their products. Marketers can then apply that knowledge across their marketing channels to make their budget work more effectively.

How are Struq going to work with agencies? Can you really work with agency holding groups? Is it possible?

We have significant relationships with many of the largest agencies and holding groups where we provide the tools for agencies to personalize display and video ads for new and existing users. Agencies want to use the best of breed technologies to deliver the greatest post click ROI for their advertisers, and we are really fortunate to work with so many great agencies.

Is Struq looking to move into video retargeting? Is this a huge area for growth?

We are active in online video advertising. We’re focused on delivering personalized ads against audiences, and this includes audiences who are found on video inventory. We want to deliver personalized ads across any format and on any device to persuade that individual to click and buy an advertiser’s products – video is a big part of that.

Read the article on Exchange Wire

This senior finance function will be a pivotal role in the business, reporting directly to the VP of Operations. This role involves handling all of the finance functions including accounting, financial reporting, financial forecasting and budgeting and all controllership matters.

RESPONSIBILITIES:
● Budgeting, forecasting, cash flow and cash management
● Performing all regulatory functions
● Take ownership, identify process improvement opportunities for existing processing and controls, and drive positive change across the organisation.
● End-to-end finance function – this will, at the outset, be a two-person department
● Responsibility for the internal and external financial planning and reporting
● Full financial responsibility to the business
● Design and implement reporting, controls and processes that are required to support financial reporting and are scalable with the growth of the business (in the UK and Europe).

The Ideal Candidate
To join a growing team of dedicated and successful professionals you will need to be highly motivated and hard-working. You will be comfortable with aggressive schedules, and a natural problem solver. Good communication skills and client focus are shared characteristics of all the Struq team.

Required skills:
• Strategist with long range vision.
• A qualified Accountant (ACA/ACCA/CA/CIMA or equivalent).
• Able to work within an entrepreneurial environment.
• Custodian of the company’s assets and supreme at cash management.
• Solid work ethic.
• Experience of European expansion and managing the finances of all European offices.
• Desire to be a strong contributor and a vital part of a rapidly expanding team and company.
• Quickly able to learn Struq’s environment and landscape.
Desired skills:
• Experience of a start-up environment and a company going through rapid growth
• Prior experience in online advertising
• MBA

The company has certainly garnered attention. It’s already working with 200 of the world’s leading retailers across 19 markets (including Adidas, Hilton Hotels and Levis). Its Ad Personalization platform operates dynamically and in real time. As a result it claims to be able to deliver 12 times higher click through rates than standard retargeted ads and says its platform can generate up to $30 in revenues for every $1 spent in marketing spend.

Sam Barnett, founder and CEO of Struq, says Reed Elsevier Ventures’ experience in big data (an early investor in Palantir Technologies, now the 11th most valuable start up globally), combined with Pentech’s experience in Personalization (an early investor in Maxymiser,), and Allen & Company’s advisory history, will provide valuable experience in scaling the company up.

Kevin Brown, General Partner at Reed Elsevier Ventures calls Barnett “one of the most talented young entrepreneurs in Europe,” which is high praise indeed given the current field of EU CEOs which is probably the best it’s ever been.

Read the article on Techcrunch

The candidate we are looking for is pro-active and hungry to use cutting edge Big Data/NoSQL data systems (MongoDB, Cassandra, Voldemort, Hadoop to name but a few), and should have a solid understand of and experience with relational databases (MSSQLSERVER, PostgreSQL, MySQL). You should have experience of data pipeline and query development, managing and manipulating large databases in clustered, multi-datacentre environments. You should also have a passion for learning as we continually expand our business and rely on new cutting-edge technologies to scale and grow Struq. The ability to learn and adapt to these new technologies is key. We process billions of queries and terabytes of data each day, all of which will be in your realm. This role reports into the Head of Data Services.

RESPONSIBILITIES:
● Design and development of both real-time and warehouse data stores, including development of queries, architecture and pipelines.
● Administration of these stores.
● Performance, integrity and security of our databases
● Query optimisation, indexing, data system architecture, ETL systems, analytics and mining.
● Using MongoDB, Hadoop and other new technologies with a view to becoming a NoSQL star
● Performance monitoring
● General technical trouble shooting and support to development teams
● Work as part of a team that provides 24/7 cover

The Ideal Candidate
To join a growing team of dedicated and successful professionals you will need to be highly motivated and hard-working. You will be comfortable with aggressive schedules, and a natural problem solver. Good communication skills and client focus are shared characteristics of all the Struq team.

Required skills:
• Programming experience – (Python/Java/C/C#)
• 2/3+ years of experience in a similar position
• Knowledge of SQLServer, MySQL and/or PostgreSQL
• Knowledge and hands on experience of at least one non-relational database system.
• Excellent attention to detail
• Great time management and organisation skills.
Desired skills:
• Degree in Computer Science or Management Information Systems (MIS)

The candidate we are looking for is a personable technology enthusiast looking to enter into a fast-growing sector. You will have a Computer Science (or similar) degree, able to work well with people across departments, and provide exceptional support to our clients. This is a fantastic opportunity for a graduate to grow their career within an exciting technology company.

RESPONSIBILITIES:
● Provide technical software implementation for client solutions
● Provide world-class support by taking ownership of customer issues, troubleshooting the issue and partnering with the appropriate team to resolve issues.
● Partner with the Engineering and Development teams to resolve customer issues and work collaboratively with client facing team members.
● Meet deadlines for client specific implementation needs
● Do whatever it takes to provide outstanding support.

The Ideal Candidate
To join a growing team of dedicated and successful professionals you will need to be highly motivated and hard-working. You will be comfortable with aggressive schedules, and a natural problem solver. Good communication skills and client focus are shared characteristics of all the Struq team.

Required skills:
• Strong interpersonal and customer service skills.
• Javascript.
• XML transforms/XSLT.
• Knowledge of at least one object-orientated language.
• Ability to multi-task.
• Work well in a team-environment and autonomously.
• Able to think quickly and precisely in a changing environment
Desired skills:
• .NET is a big plus.
• Exposure to SQL is also highly desirable.
• Degree in related field.
• As we go global, other languages are always a bonus.

The candidate we are looking for has a fantastic eye for detail and strong layout skills. You will be full of ideas and able to work well alone and in a team environment. You would be working at the forefront of technology and delivering unmatched performance and design to numerous top-name brands.

RESPONSIBILITIES:
● Using Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator and Flash
● Working on multiple projects to very tight deadlines
● Communicating and presenting ideas
● Constantly looking to push the boundaries of Struq
● Creative thinking
● Building XML templates
● Servicing clients
● Art–working

The Ideal Candidate
To join a growing team of dedicated and successful professionals you will need to be highly motivated and hard-working. You will be comfortable with aggressive schedules, and a natural problem solver. Good communication skills and client focus are shared characteristics of all the Struq team.

Required skills:
• Demonstrated understanding of online brand and direct response advertising (this is a must)
• High knowledge of Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator and Flash (Adobe Suite)
• Creative and innovative
• Great eye for detail
• Art-working
• Strong layout & design skills
• Storyboarding
• Able to work by themselves or as part of a team
• Good communication, organisation and time keeping skills
• Keep up to date with online trends and development and can demonstrate a good understanding of advertising trends and interest in online technology developments
Desired skills:
• Basic understanding of HTML (or similar)
• Animation (Flash CS4 or Higher with AS3 coding experience)
• Interactive design
• After effects
• Online banner design experience

Agencies are beginning to adopt retargeting now as part of their model. What is Struq’s view on this adopted agency business model?

Retargeting is critical for advertisers as it converts browsers into paying customers, lengthens customer lifetime value and increases revenue per user. Agency adoption helps educate clients about the power of ad personalisation – that in order to persuade users to buy your product or service, it is imperative you deliver a personalised relevant ad to persuade that user. That has fuelled the adoption of Personalized Video and Personalized Pretargeting (advertisers acquiring new users) by advertisers and agencies.

Can companies like Struq really work with agencies? You clearly have client direct relationships in the ecom space? Aren’t you competition for the agencies?

Agencies are experts at what they do – they are aligned to plan and buy media as effectively as possible for advertisers.

Struq’s technology enables advertisers to acquire users at half the cost of any other retargeting provider.

As a result, the majority of Struq’s business is through media agencies as they seek to provide the most efficient means to spend money that results in post-click revenue for their clients.

Does Struq really need to work with agencies? Clearly the client direct relationship has paid serious dividends? Why would Struq need to work with agencies?

Struq powers post-click performance across the marketing funnel for Marketing Directors and Media Buyers alike. Both the Media Buyer and the Marketing Director have the same objective, to persuade users to buy products at the lowest possible cost.

Struq enables media agencies and clients direct to buy Personalized Video and Personalized Display advertising that delivers lucrative post-click revenue.

Retargeting is becoming an increasingly commoditised product – how is Struq differentiating itself from the competition?

Struq works solely with the largest brands in the verticals of ecommerce, retail, finance and travel across 19 markets. All of these brands have tried multiple vendors and continue to work with Struq solely because Struq automates the delivery of a post-click CPA because we understand the value of a user and what makes a user click and buy.

Struq ascertains which users are valuable to an advertiser. We then target the right users to hit an advertiser’s post-click CPA/COS/ROI target with fully personalised creative. Struq then provides unique insight to clients, enabling advertisers to understand which products, creative elements, publishers, etc. drove post-click performance for them (which they then frequently leverage across their other marketing activity).

Struq has applied our core targeting technology across display and video to deliver lucrative post-click performance across the marketing funnel for advertisers.

Is Struq’s technology proprietary and how do you compete against the growing number of DSPs offering dynamic creative solutions – particularly Invite which, according to rumours, will have a dynamic creative component (Teracent) built into its new iteration?

Unlike the majority of the RTB market, Struq has built its own DSP, Bid Optimisation Engine, Recommendation Engine and Dynamic Creative Optimisation Engine. These needed to be proprietary to enable the data to be extensible so that we could extract the value out of data to make user level decisions. Struq determines the display ad content, media placement, targeting criteria and bid price in real time based on data intelligence. The result is that Struq acquires a user at half the cost of any other video, display or retargeting provider.

Struq is looking to position itself as the leading Ad Personalization Company in the market. Can you talk to us in more detail what ad Personalization really is?

Advertising is a communication to persuade users to buy a product or service. Struq is transforming that communication from a generic push communication to a relevant personalised communication.

Personalised Retargeting by Struq showed that by delivering relevant ads to consumers, they were 12 times more likely to click and buy a product or service. Ad personalization breaks the one-size-fits-all paradigm, it is about making each ad both personal and relevant to each user. Ultimately, it leads to greater post-click revenue for advertisers, higher quality of ads for publishers and a much better experience for end users.

Struq is now bringing that level of performance to advertisers across a user’s entire decision making process.

You are rolling new products around video. Can you tell us a more about these new products? Are you simply launching these products in response to what Brainient has starting offering in the market?

Struq’s core purpose is serving personalized, relevant, performance-driven ads to users.

Struq is a single point for advertisers to persuade users at every stage of the buying process across any channel. Struq is able to both identify new prospective customers and convert prospective customers at scale through personalised display and video. Advertisers need to use an integrated offering across channels to gain understanding and insight into what drives customers to buy their products.

We have applied our core targeting technology across these mediums to deliver lucrative post-click performance across the marketing funnel for advertisers.

How have you seen the market evolve over the past 12 months and where do you see it heading in 2012?

The economic climate is bleak for 2012. Advertisers need people to click and buy products through their advertising to justify spending money on marketing in a tough economic climate. Struq’s Personalised Video and Display ads make ads relevant to consumers, which enables advertisers to make on average £20 in post click revenue for every pound spent. Struq’s Personalized products seek to meet the needs of advertisers in a tough economic climate.

Read the article on Exchange Wire

The candidate we are looking for is an experienced Account Manager who will play a key part in maintaining relationships with our clients and driving Struq’s business further.

RESPONSIBILITIES:
● Act as the primary point-of-contact for the client.
● Lead the day-to-day management and optimisation of client campaigns.
● Drive strategic campaign development and identify areas for upsell opportunities and areas for account growth.
● Keen awareness of how best to collate and present analysis of campaign performance and set agendas.
● Define clients’ business needs and identify areas of opportunity to grow campaigns relating back to performance against client targets.
● Develop presentations and case studies both for use internally and in the wider market place.

The Ideal Candidate
To join a growing team of dedicated and successful professionals you will need to be highly motivated and hard-working. You will be comfortable with aggressive schedules, and a natural problem solver. Good communication skills and client focus are shared characteristics of all the Struq team.

Required skills:
• Degree and 2+ years account management experience.
• Experience in analysis of data and how best to use this analysis to meet the clients’ needs.
• Highly organised and capable of handling multiple ad hoc requests
• Excellent written and oral communication skills
• Proven history of self-direction, creativity, and ability to meet deadlines
• Advanced working knowledge of Excel and PowerPoint

The candidate we are looking for is an experienced sales manager who has awareness of online advertising and marketing and will play a key part in growing Struq’s business.

RESPONSIBILITIES:
● Increasing our sales performance
● High focus on targets and success
● Consummate sales professional

The Ideal Candidate
To join a growing team of dedicated and successful professionals you will need to be highly motivated and hard-working. You will be comfortable with aggressive schedules, and a natural problem solver. Good communication skills and client focus are shared characteristics of all the Struq team.

Required skills:
• Demonstrable sales success
• Awareness of online advertising/marketing
• Pro-active and persuasive
• Winning attitude
• Demonstrated success in working with agency and client contacts
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills
• Fluency with Microsoft PowerPoint, Word and Excel
Desired skills:
• Search engine/display marketing experience
• Photoshop CS3/4 and Flash CS3/4 experience

The candidate we are looking for will take our dynamic new concept into the industry and will be responsible for identifying, sourcing, pitching, defining, negotiating, closing and managing revenue. We are looking for someone who is well-connected to brands and agencies or television. A strategic seller and hunter with a strong desire to represent an industry disruptor as it grows its market share.

RESPONSIBILITIES:
● Launching our new video product into the market
● High focus on targets and success
● Consummate sales professional
● Able to be a pioneer for Struq

The Ideal Candidate
To join a growing team of dedicated and successful professionals you will need to be highly motivated and hard-working. You will be comfortable with aggressive schedules, and a natural problem solver. Good communication skills and client focus are shared characteristics of all the Struq team.

Required skills:
• Track record of demonstrable sales success against quota
• Deep understanding of the online media/ad network/monetization ecosystem
• Pro-active and persuasive
• Winning attitude
• Customer focused
• Excellent communication, networking and negotiation skills
• Current relationships with media buying/television decision makers