Bogdan Gavrila – Core Target | Business Blog

It’s not a secret that I’m a Ferrari fan and I’m one of the proud founders of the online Romanian Ferrari Fan Club. Although the website is very small, the fans have really big hearts. Now, because Fiat and Vodafone are brands connected to Ferrari we should be together to celebrate the last season of Michael Schumacher’s and I decided that ARBOmedia will be the ones who will bring the global Ferrari sponsors closer to the fans.

Please contact Magda for the technical details.

Now you know it! A new product will be available on the market in the near future.
The main website ( ZIUA.net – ads by Boom) will also have a new version very soon. On the other hand, both ZIUA IASI and ZIUA CONSTANTA already have their new faces online. Although ZIUA.net has ads served by Boom (one of the last contracts Orlando signed before leaving Netbridge), the regional versions seem to like ARBOmedia – ZIUACT already uses the ARBO ad server.

My friend, Andrei from Saptamana Clujeana has a new hobby and as I can see he is an event manager – thanks to him, the famous guitarist and jazz guru is coming to Romania this November. Check out the official page of the event and maybe I’ll see you there!

I remember that last October I was involved in a conference regarding the brand “Romania” – how to protect the brand and how to counteract the subversions that come through mass-media. A very interesting slide show was delivered by Vasile Paun (one of the heads of the Romanian army intelligence service), a man who has quite an impressive expertise on the electronic environment. The presentation was about the electronic threats and attacks via Internet that can affect the Romanian brands and values.

Let me give you an example: check out the Romanian orthodox pages on Google. You’ll access a few portals that have nothing to do with the Romanian Orthodox Church and the themes they debate are sometimes closer to religious extremism. Although called “orthodox advices” this websites have no author and a separate black agenda on the side.

I wrote this post because of the clip URSUS made a few months ago: A world without Romania – the clip is broadcasted on YouTube (over 400.000 views).

Short after the original film was published, a sequel was produced and posted online.

Now, YOU do the math and connect the dots.

Next week-end I’ll be in Predeal, invited by ARBOmedia in their annual teambuilding. My history with ARBOmedia started this spring.

Before ARBO, we had (and still have) a few sales deputies that covered the special accounts that are still making money. Because of the good traffic we have in our network, I decided that a good way to increase our revenues was to work with GOOGLE, NEOGEN, BOOM or ARBO.

First, we had GOOGLE AD SENSE scripts running and maybe at that time maybe they had few clients from Romania so there was nothing spectacular going on.

We switched to NEOGEN and spend some time to play with their network. They were “under construction” with some features so It wasn’t fun to have porn ads in your front page. Comparing their system to Google Ad Sense, we could see some increase in the bank but still, this is a “pay-per-click” network and they have less than 10% in the market.

So, my eyes focused on the two companies that handled over 1 mil. $ each (Romania is still a growing market and still in the beginning): Netbridge’s Boom and ARBOmedia.

As I was saying, my first encounter with ARBO was this spring. Some friends from a major newspaper invited Magdalena Zander and Laurentiu Pop for a presentation. I was invited to be the “black sheep” and make sure they were not beating around the bush. After a few hours of talking and debating, I made sure that I was a quite a pain but they carefully answered all the questions and in the end they made a good impression to my friends.

In that period I was decided to go with BOOM because they would pay a monthly fee and because ARBOmedia just lost the TVR (The Romanian Television) account and this meant a smaller influence in the market.

But then, two interesting things happened: I received an internal report from ARBOmedia AG and their approach on the Romanian market was optimistic. They were also mentioning losing TVR a risk but they predicted that at the end of 2006, everything would be quite ok. But, the thing that made me take the final decision was that I found out that Orlando Nicoara (the Netbridge manager) was not happy with the investors and had plans to leave the NCH Advisors. Everybody knew that Orlando was a “one man army” at Boom. Few people knew that his leaving will bring a small disaster to BOOM.

So, it’s September 2006, I went with ARBOmedia, they succeeded to regain their influence after losing TVR, Orlando indeed left BOOM and their network (no.1 at the beginning of this year) is now decimated and the new management tries to cut down the costs.

My spring choice meant a few thousands euro increase but this is not the most important thing when working with ARBO. An important fact is that they represent your products and raise the awareness in the field. Indeed, they are professionals with their home works done just well. They also offer you the advantage of the AD SERVER and the possibility to run you’re own campaigns and develop other online projects. But the most important thing is that they have a team that protects your business and investments (if one of the employees is to leave for another company, the network won’t crush) and they also work on raising the online advertising market and this means they have a vision.

This is why the ARBOmedia team is no.1.

(PS: also because they have clients like me )