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In 2002, ICG was one of the first companies to provide rich media video streaming solutions to the European online advertising market. Through an exclusive relationship with Yahoo!, ICG’s rich media advertising platform, ad-booster, led the market in video streaming and provided a cross media solution for traditional advertisers to venture into online advertising. Although ICG’s initial steps were in customer acquisition, ICG’s goal was to build a market leading digital platform for customer retention*. Today, the media world is changing rapidly, and we are seeing a big shift by companies away from traditional advertising towards more targeted one-to-one marketing solutions. After many years of development, ICG now has the platform to take advantage of this shifting market place, and gain important inroads into the rapidly growing digital communication space. * Building a customer retention platform was the initial vision of Patrick Ashworth, the founder of ICG. A platform which leveraged his many years spent working for Swatch Watches as Head of Global Direct Marketing. In the late-90s, all Swatch communications were being delivered through traditional channels. Although the internet seemed the ideal direct marketing vehicle, few solutions were available that addressed the real needs of direct marketers - the ability to build a direct channel to one’s consumers (or stakeholders) to deliver permission-based, targeted rich media content. Web sites provide a presence, but are reactive; and email marketing has many deficiencies – it does not allow companies to convey the emotion that many brands seek, and the uniqueness of an exclusive channel. The vision of the founder was to build an online direct marketing platform that would address the needs of direct marketers, and the needs of department heads for any type of corporate communications. |
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