Cover story
atisfy was founded in 2018 and has gone from a consultancy of gaming products run by two individuals to a company of 30 and recruiting with a line of business focused on gamification and interactivity. Another line is focused on technology, psychology, and business growth with an upcoming launch of three interconnected products powered by AI that will solve massive pain points in the influencer marketing and advertising space.
“atisfy offers everything from a one-stop-shop to enterprise-level businesses all the way up to intricate MarTech and AdTech products poised to disrupt the influencer marketing industry,” said Hersh Bhatt, CEO of atisfy. “It is also hard to deny our position as a company that has remained one of the best in its field with no sacrifice to quality despite exponential growth and global expansion.”
The company works with dedication to finding, attracting, and retaining the best talent in the industry and is relentless in hiring individuals who are deemed to be unicorns on the spot. atisfy also has a culture code for expertise and human resources. Some fundamental values and codes the organization lives up to include: care about the output, not input; driving measurable results with return on investment, not just creative campaigns; fostering the best talent; offering a healthy severance package to anything short of top performers; and also providing autonomy with vision and direction.
“atisfy offers everything from a one-stop-shop to enterprise-level businesses all the way up to intricate MarTech and AdTech products poised to disrupt the influencer marketing industryHersh Bhatt”, CEO & co-founder
“We came across most of our ideas by listening to our customers. But we do not simply listen – we use our expertise to uncover pain points and find ways to address this in a way that can be systemized or productized. atisfy understands what is missing in the market and quickly makes it accessible to all businesses. That is the core behind how we take all our ideas forward.” added Bhatt.
The primary differentiator between atisfy and other competitors is the complete avoidance of industry practices which are outdated and irrelevant to an increasingly well informed and spoilt for the chosen market. The company offers prices that remain similar, despite the outstanding track record, and the minimum budgets for new customers also remain low. atisfy uses its acclaimed position as a market leader to empower more businesses further, lowering the barrier to entry for customers, and increasing talent density and complexity growing to avoid a process laden business model.
The founder of atisfy, Hersh Bhatt, has always looked up to individuals from sport such as Muhamad Ali, Michael Schumacher, and Cristiano Ronaldo all the way over to artists such as Eminem who have impacted him greatly as idols outside the business world. The reason for this is that these are people who make others realize that getting to the top is the easy part. Staying there and maintaining your position is the part that’s difficult.
atisfy has come across a variety of challenges among clients and have a catalog of over 200 services and an endless amount of custom solutions to address this. In general, their clients are a collection of enterprises that are struggling to break into new markets, disruptive start-ups, and businesses looking to transform themselves digitally. The organization’s approach is to understand the business or project’s bottom line or KPIs, and then provide a consultative approach from the first contact to the first sale to post-sale service.
More specifically, atisfy starts by finding out if the client is actually solving the right problem. Einstein once said “If I were given one hour to save the planet, I would spend 59 minutes defining the problem and one minute resolving it”. atisfy always start by helping customers define their problem clearly which the organization and the customer often mutually discover are not the same as what they initially felt their problem was. Most organizations do not heed Einstein’s advice when approaching innovation or problem solving and therefore, they fail to overcome challenges regardless of the investment into the actual project.
Innovation is a response to a problem that needs solving, not an act for the sake of innovation. atisfy hire people that suit the rule that problem-solving is the essence of what leaders exist to do. atisfy have found in the process of growing the business that many other firms in the same space often fail to solve the core of each problem they are dealt. It is not uncommon for atisfy to get clients from world-renowned creative agencies approach and say that despite the most creative campaign and polished design, the problem never got addressed to its core and their bottom line was left unchanged.
atisfy works with a different approach as the organization masters the definition of a given problem. The organization watches, tests, and records details that relate to the customers. This is what helps atisfy in solving the biggest customers’ challenges in the most innovative way possible. Designers and data scientists at atisfy alike are taught to ask the question “why?” before they embark on any project. Another way the approach differs is that the organization supports the potential customers to work through ambiguity, uncertainty, and changing industry environments.
The customers associated with the organization also often need not just innovation but leadership. In a crisis or amidst a problem, leadership does not mean having a predefined response plan, but the behaviors and mindsets that will prevent overreaction and underreaction. Organizational structures and processes are not what atisfy invest in. The organization invests in people that stimulate innovation, something that puts atisfy ahead of most businesses in the field.
The biggest technological advancement atisfy sees is in the marketing, advertising, and the MarTech/AdTech space. It is the ability to measure from the first touch point to final purchase and the data generated through this process’s occurrence. The organization does not focus on chasing after the latest and greatest marketing software but prefers to innovate their own in-house or self-serve marketing software that will give the customers a competitive edge.
The planned launch of the 2020 products includes three synergistic components that leverage the best in class and most modern advancements in the industry. These components will solve the largest pain point in one of the fastest-growing industries in marketing – influencer marketing and the inability for any system on the planet today to enable complete measurement, AI-driven matchmaking and audience targeting in one easy to use experience that scales endlessly.
This product will include three unique pieces; atisfyreach, the first-ever advertising platform that lets businesses procure influencer marketing services using self-serve technologies, best in class reporting, and algorithmic matchmaking. Next is atisfyre, a real-time web and mobile app for influencers to transform their content and work into a full-time career through easy monetization and endless job offers and their desired asking price. Finally, there is atisfyreact, an AI system that ensures the right business is matched to the right influencer’s audiences, and the influencer can accept the job with a 2 button click system in real-time.
atisfy’s services are often like an iceberg, and the impact is felt 90% below the surface and 10% on the surface. In one instance, the organization has worked with gaming giant Wargaming.net on a new to world product that was 100%, unlike anything they had ever done before. atisfy’s role was to help them establish a brand bible, go-to-market plan, run micro-influencer tests, and segments for their launch. The data-driven capacity of the organization was so potent that while they initially ordered to investigate a market with three to four overlying attributes, atisfy managed to uncover over 15 attributes that, in conjunction, helped the brand run highly segmented and personalized campaigns to every segment in their 100 million plus player target market globally.
In another example, atisfy has worked with Korea’s largest software firm, along with the Skylanders IP and publisher Activision to develop influencer marketing strategies. The organization utilized their database consisting of over 10 million influencers with 30 billion pieces of content and 9 trillion views analyzed to curate the perfect 1,000 influencers for their new product launch. The app achieved a user base of 1 million-plus in under a month.
In terms of technological advancements, the company’s future will involve increased automation, a more significant investment into data science, the ability to enable small businesses to market like enterprises with smaller budgets. And the ability to build products and solutions that can be used by multiple customers to save them money and enable better scalability. The organization also seeks to keep investing in T-shaped marketers with a broad breadth of digital abilities and depth in a few key areas.
atisfy continues to view the future of marketing as one that takes place in a data and a technologically driven world where marketers use these new tools to commit to put the end consumer at the center of their strategy. Most of the industry does not think about the future enough, in fact a study in 2019 called the CMO survey indicated that most marketing leaders are more focused on managing the present. That is a mistake in a fast-evolving field like marketing.
The organization’s other technological focus areas will be hyper-automation with AI, leveraging distributed cloud technology, using applicable blockchain technologies when sensible, and exploring human augmentation as areas that will empower future marketers. Using technology to liberate marketers is a critical component of the industry’s future and enables them to step up to a more strategic level. The largest technology leap atisfy is taking is driven by the development of the holy technology trinity of big data, AI, and quantum computing– a pathway to open a treasure chest of unprecedented opportunities in the form of entirely new applications to reach and monetize customers better.
The organization remains grounded in the fact that besides being educated and tapping into complex technology-related applications in marketing, it also needs to continue to excel in the traditional fundamentals, some of which will remain a constant. What the company wants to achieve will not be changing, the way by which it will achieve the changes will be evolving at light speed.
The company’s geographical expansion will involve hiring more talent from around the world, having a center in each major continent, and at the same time, not focusing on geography at the cost of core strength. When atisfy started with headquarters in Australia (now Singapore), it continues to service those in Europe, the US, and Canada. atisfy will focus on expansion into other languages and cultural trends specific to non-western markets once the organization is entirely comfortable as a leading service provider in the western and modern Asian markets.
atisfy is offering pre-beta discounts to businesses at reach.atisfy.com for businesses looking to run large scale influencer campaigns and also offering free access to influencers on fyre.atisfy.com.
