The Hitflip UK Blog

A very important part of Hitflip are the investors. While people often talk about smart money, we have really gained a lot from our investors. From bizdev contacts to low-level operational help.
Here’s a brief overview of our investors:

• The Samwer Brothers (European Founders Fund GmbH) are known for having founded Alando (aquired by eBay to become eBay Germany) and Jamba / Jamster (aquired by Verisgn and later Newscorp).
• Bernd M. Michael is a strategic advisor to the Grey advertising agency group. It is the second largest agency network in Germany. Bernd Michael was head of the agency for many years.
• Lukasz Gadowski is founder and CEO of Europe’s biggest online merchandising specialist Spreadshirt.
• Gerrit Schumann was the founder and CEO of element 5 which now belongs to Digital River.
• Peter Schüpbach is CEO of Swizerland-based Genevalogic.
• Christian Vollmann built Germanys biggest online dating platform and is now the founder and CEO of Germanys leading online video platform MyVideo.
• Dr. Hansruedi Heeb was the founder and CEO of Zürich-based Esmertec.
• Tobias Hundhausen (CPA) is a financial specialist and founder of several companies including BrainCapital.
• Frank Hock is the deputy chairman of the supervisory board of net AG.
• Dr. Stefan Immes is the founder and CEO of the listed IT-holding net AG.
• Arend Lars Iven und Ron Hillmann are founders and owners of a highly specialised cutting edge online marketing agency.
• net AG is a successful listed high tech conglomerate based in Koblenz.
• Brains-to-Ventures AG is a St. Gallen (Switzerland) based network of business angels.

To learn more about the UK advertising market and to meet some key players before our expansion I went to AdTech and the Affiliate Get2Gether. I was especially looking for differences compared to the German market. I can compare Ad Tech (German) to the corresponding fair OMD (German) in Germany.

At OMD you will find more CEOs of the companies who actually advertise, rather than the big websites where those ads are published. At Ad Tech I had the impression that there were almost only intermediaries. By that I mean companies who offer advertisers their services. I also had the imporession that there were many companies “of the same kind” with hardly anything differentiating them from their competitors. There were at least 20+ companies who offer to manage your emailings for you. We don’t need one of those companies because we do that ourselves. I wonder whether UK online-companies tend to outsource more?

You can find all my pictures from this occasion on our Flickr-Account. Here’s a selection with some comments.

The Dixie Queen.

I think it is a great idea to “mark” everybody according to their “role”. Haven’t seen that in Germany yet.

There was heavy networking going on on two decks.

In Germany Affiliates gatherings are actually never this big. Usually there will be 50 to a max of 100 people but the meetings are more frequent and take place in many different cities. In Germany the online market is not concentrated in one city as in the UK (I’m talking about London! ;-)). There is a lot of action happening in Cologne, Berlin, Munich, Hamburg, Frankfurt and a couple of other cities.

On the other hand the affiliate to “other” ratio is different. There are more affiliates compared to the “others” wanting to talk to the affiliates. Luckily I didn’t need to be on an “affiliate contact hunt” because talking to other merchants or networks was also very valuable to learn about the UK.

At German Affiliate Mettings there is usually no entrance fee and either sponsors who pay for one or all drinks or everyone pays their own bill.

Actually I found the Dixie Band very entertaining.

I also shot some movies while being on the boat to capture the vibes of the event.

In Germany we have seen quite a funny phenomenon happening where you would see many women and some internet celebs wearing a Hitflip Merchandising Bag. It really seems to be a fashion item in the German affiliate marketing scene. For me as a Hitflip founder it was so great to see that this fashion trend has alredy reached UK even though our website hasn’t even launched yet. Here’s some pics to prove what I’m saying:

If you see anybody else walking around with this trendy bag we’d be thankful for a short message.

Afterwords I found it a pity I coulnd’t make to the after boat tour meeting at the hotel because I had to catch my flight. I’m looking foreward to visiting UK / London again for further market research.

Here’s some other blogposts reporting on the event:

• Fraser
• Jessica Luthi
• Azam
• Patrick
• 5Star
• Paul Wright

So Hitflip is a German company. Business in Germany is fine and additionally we are ambitious to expand internationally. Our Austrian branch should be starting business this month. Sure that’s a nice and new and a big thing but it also is not that complicated. Austria is not that different from Germany when it comes to prices of media products, media consumption behaviour and online marketing and that’s some strongly influencing factors for our business model. In UK all these factors differ quite a bit!!! In Germany we have to blogs: one targeting our barter-community-members and one for our affiliates. As we have neither members nor affiliates yet one could ask: why already blog? Well. We see quite some differences between the countries and we think it might be interesting and worth a read for people from the UK as well as Germans to read about these differences. For this reason we’ve installed a category called “Going to UK” that we will primarily be writing in before our launch of the UK branch.
P.S. Please excuse if my English is imperfect.