"In five years, we expect up to 70 percent mobile traffic"

Oliver Rihs (44) has been CEO of Scout24 Schweiz AG for more than two years.MK What user needs does your offering address? And how do you differ from other online marketplaces?OLIVIER RIHS Scout24 offers online platforms for virtually every area of life, i.e. for cars and motorcycles (autoscout24. ch/motoscout24.ch), real estate (immoscout24.ch), Jobs (jobscout24.ch), partnerships (friendscout24.ch) and classifieds (market.scout24.ch). According to the NET-Metrix study, around 2.1 million people, i.e. around 26.5 percent of all Swiss Internet users, visit our platforms at least once a month.We invest heavily in the user-friendliness, further development and security of our marketplaces - and our success proves us right: AutoScout24, with over 140,000 advertisements and more than eight million visits per month, is clearly the number one for new and used vehicles in Switzerland, and ImmoScout24 and JobScout24 are also among the leading platforms in their fields.MK What role does editorial content play in your offerings?RIHS The magazine and advice pages on our platforms offer our users important added value. Users can find out about relevant topics, give their opinion and subscribe to the latest trends via newsletter. The editorial content also proves that we are more than "just" a marketplace, we offer everything to do with real estate and cars.The AutoScout24 magazine and the ImmoScout24 guidebook demonstrate competence and create trust - we consider both to be important prerequisites for our customer relationships.MK What trends can you identify in the field of online advertising? And what are the advantages of advertising on online marketplaces?RIHS On the one hand, the trend is toward mobile advertising, but also toward larger and more exclusive forms of advertising. One of the advantages of advertising on our marketplaces is that we can offer our customers precise and target-group-specific placement of their advertising. This technical targeting is possible because we know exactly who is moving where and when on our platforms. We also see a clear trend toward simplifying the processes between advertisers/agencies and publishers. We recognized the issue of programmatic buying early on and, together with our marketing partner Omnimedia, have a solution in place for our customers that allows us to offer our traffic in an automated manner. This works on individual platforms such as Autoscout24 or also on all websites of the Scout24 Group.In addition, we will have a behavioral targeting solution in place from 2014, with which the advertiser can reach his customers even more precisely.MK More and more people are accessing your platforms via mobile. How are you adapting your offering to this trend? And what solutions do you offer in the area of mobile advertising?RIHS We are already recording between 30 and almost 40 percent mobile visits on the Scout24 platforms. In five years, we expect up to 70% traffic via mobile devices. This is one of the reasons why Scout24 is specifically focusing on mobile and investing in this sector. We offer new solutions (iPhone, iPad, Android) at regular intervals.Since their launch, our free apps have always ranked among the top. Both the ImmoScout24 and Autoscout24 iPhone apps have been among the top three in the business sector since their launch. A total of around 1.3 million Autoscout24 and ImmoScout24 apps have already been downloaded. Mobile advertising is also increasingly being booked in the web/mobile package. We will continue to develop our offerings in parallel with advertisers' needs and user behavior.MK What innovations do you have planned for the future? Are there any areas in which the online market offering can still be expanded?RIHS We recently relaunched the ImmoScout24 site. The revised platform is even faster, more user-friendly and more attractive. The design is fresh and light, and the search has been optimized in various ways. For example, it is now possible to search for a suitable property in several towns at the same time, or in the city of Zurich also by district, or in French-speaking Switzerland in parallel in Geneva and in the French border region.Furthermore, we offer dealers an exciting Online2Ad tool on AutoScout24. It enables direct and simple booking of online campaigns. As mentioned, we are also constantly working on the further development of our mobile applications. In general, it can be said that the online Classified market is consolidated and mature. The development of new niche platforms is still possible at any time. However, no new themed marketplaces are currently planned at Scout24. sw