Espotting
Founding Team l VP Global Marketing & Communications
Founding team and employee number 5 at Espotting, Europe’s first paid search network. Launched in the dot com crash, Chrysi was instrumental in building Espotting which grew to 200 people across 8 European markets and sold for £100 million ($186 million).
Espotting launched the pay per click model in Europe - bringing to market a new innovating online advertising model. Three years before Google AdWords launched. This was Web 1.0.
Espotting is where Chrysi honed her love for entrepreneurship and building new business models. For doing the unconventional. For smart & unexpected marketing. For obsessing over where and how people are connecting and consuming media. For building successful teams. For looking for the white space, seeing trends, being innovative, agile, creative and connecting dots.
With the sale of Espotting to an American company, Chrysi moved to New York to lead global marketing and communications across the group - a global digital media company servicing 100,000 advertisers across 3 continents.
From Espotting, Chrysi became the Managing Director, NY for Steak, another digital media business where she served as a board member. Steak sold to Dentsu in 2011.
Awards & Recognitions
FT Creative Business 50
Financial Times
Most Dynamic Media Company
Media Momentum Awards
Best European Paid Search Network
Search Engine Watch Awards
How Do You Take On A $1.2 Billion US Competitor When You are The British Start-up Without A Marketing Budget?
With smarts, strategy, creativity, and a lot of cheek (aka guerrilla marketing).
Espotting’s US competitor was called Overture and they were expanding across Europe.
In the early 2000's it was a digital land-grab between the two companies.
Overture had launched in the UK but the url overture.co.uk was - and still is - owned by a hi-fi company in Oxfordshire.
So we called them, explained how Overture was the name of our competitor and asked them if we could put a ‘banner’ ad on their website if we paid them £1,000. They said yes.
The banner ad had a search box within it and we then took out this full page ads in the trade press that said “Espotting powers search on overture.co.uk”.
Our phones rang off the hook from our advertisers and partners. They loved it.
Overture sent us a cease and desist letter. We loved that & framed it.
