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MEET THE PEOPLE Ioana Manaila, COO at Hypercentage

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DCB is old tech, we are paying in Bitcoins. So says Ioana Manaila, who has been in the affiliate marketing field for four years with Hypercentage. Starting with a passion for media buying and used to buy from some 200 different sources each month, she moved up to business development in the digital department and has focused on developing long term partnerships with affiliates worldwide, constantly exploring and experimenting with different sources and trends

Here she discusses how affiliate marketing is set to develop, the role of cryptocurrencies and how DCB is old

Who are you and what is your current role?

My name is Ioana Manaila, COO at Hypercentage. I am currently in charge of our digital department, that ensures the monetisation within the company via inside the web methods. We are live in approximately 60 countries, all across Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America. Our core activity is creating, developing and monetising our own mobile content with our proprietary telecom billing solutions.

Which countries or regions do you feel represent the greatest opportunity for telemedia services?

Our extensive experience of over 15 years in working with Asia, Africa and the Middle East allows us a leverage towards adding our products in these markets in terms of competitivity. Everything we do is based on history and constant insights we are getting from key players in these countries. Moreover, our direct connections with local service operators gives us the constant opportunity towards ensuring the best possible connections for the users to use our services.

Just recently, we have dived into new markets in Latin America, which has proven to be a great strategic move, as we have only experienced constant growth and positive feedback from our affiliates database.

Which content and/or applications do you see being the most likely to benefit from telemedia billing and/or marketing technologies?

The benefits from carrier billing and all these new innovative marketing technologies will be seen majorly for those that provide high quality content based on the customer’s feedback or for those who follow as a main lead towards developing their products actual human needs and find ways to supply for them.

Do you think that Direct Carrier Billing can become mainstream and in which markets?

Direct Carrier Billing (DCB) IS OLD TECHNOLOGY! DCB requires careful service investigation and hard to reach conditions for each merchant. If the carrier has enough similar services active, he can decide to reject your product. DCB pays in local currency and merchants are losing from the FX rates. DCB pays every 90 days and usually has lots of chargebacks. DCB started to refuse more and more services day by day.It has only side effects.

Our offers use an alternative in-house monetisation processor, pay by call and pay by SMS. All simple, all rapid, all international. No chargebacks, NO frauds, NO FX losses, only international currencies (EURO or USD).

What are the key drivers and inhibitors for growth?

For anything to evolve there is a need to be curious and hands on everything happening on a daily basis in the environment where your business focus in. Moreover, the curiosity needs to be transformed and applied in developments on how to make your core products even better and aligned to the constant changing human needs. On the opposite hands, what will delay or stop growth it is going to be a narrow perspective and fear of change.

Do you see affiliate marketing being a primary, trusted channel for telemedia propositions or do you think alternative routes to market will become more popular?

Affiliate marketing has been and will continue to be a strong channel for online promotion, but for it to continue growing there is a big need at the moment for transparency and high performance. If these won’t be provided, new channels will continue to arise and takeover the market share.

What are they likely to be?   

This will depend mostly on what a company defines as quality for them and where they can reach it out. After the affiliate marketing wave took over, people got fonder into finding quality users and getting the best lifetime value for one, therefore the perspective should be broader towards finding each product’s unique gold pond.

How likely is it that crypto currencies will become popular telemedia/mobile payment mechanisms for premium content, services and applications and are you using it in your company?

From a popularity point of view, there is no doubt that they will continue to grow and be explored by more&more people, especially since big players in the social media field will launch their own crypto currencies, but there still stands a point regarding the trust they are getting and the unknown threats they might present. So, from my point of view, the awareness is going to happen for sure, but it will face problems down the funnel towards creating solid leads.

WE ARE PAYING IN Bitcoin to the affiliates who requested this. We are working on a product where people can buy Satoshi (smallest unit of Bitcoin/micro bitcoins) by using our in-house monetisation processor. Keep in touch for this.

Your words of wisdom: On a more personal level, what is the most inspiring piece of advice that has seen you through a life in business to this day and who gave that advice to you?

I have always hated the phrase “Work smarter, not harder”. My personal motto towards my professional life is “Work smarter and harder” because no great results will show up without constant effort and the learning process should never flatten out if your end goal is to make a change and develop something that will last. This piece of advice has been offered to me by someone I very much look up to, for always doing what he is passionate about in life and doing it at the highest level possible.

What have been the most significant affects of Covid19 on the market and have you taken any “positives” from such a challenging set of circumstances?

Luckily our business course has not been affected by Covid19, as the online presence of the users’ has increased, therefore giving us a great opportunity to rise our figures and especially learn from this “organic” growth on how to improve our products and adding more value to them for getting the customers’ satisfaction. We are also happy with more people getting acquainted to the online environment, therefore providing us with a new targeting category that for sure will have happened at some point, but at a much slower pace.

In the next 12 months what key technical developments or innovations do you feel will have the most positive impact on mCommerce (VAS / mobile payments / marketing)?

I think marketing will be the go-to approach, at least for us internally, as this has proven to offer us a great leverage into our products’ growth.

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