Digital marketing: start-up Kamp'n flourishes in Marseille!

The growing company plans to hire 10 employees

Charles Martin Laval, a serial entrepreneur from Marseille, spent several years in Paris before deciding to found his start-up in his hometown in 2016. The French Tech movement was in full swing, the digital sector in Aix-Marseille was taking shape and anything seemed possible! At the time, Provence Promotion encouraged him to go for it, introducing him to the local ecosystem whose members would enable him to secure initial funding from the BPI and Provence Business angels. Five years on, he has no regrets: his staff size has tripled and sales are booming. Beyond the entrepreneurial success story, he and his team have found many advantages to living in Provence.

Kamp'n has grown on pace with the advertising market in France. Spending on digital advertising has doubled in 10 years and now accounts for over 34% of all media buys (source: statistica.com, 2010-2017). As a result, finding the right tools to effectively manage online advertising has become a central challenge for businesses over the years.

As a developer of SaaS software, Kamp'n offers flexible ways to manage Facebook Ads, Google Ads, Instagram Ads and, more recently, Snapchat Ads. It provides advertisers with turnkey solutions or hybrid support that leverages the strategic insights of a team of experts to boost the performance of their digital advertising strategy by an average of 30% according to their most recent customer survey.

Well-known brands like Winamax, GRDF, But and France Télévisions have called on Kamp'n and the AdTech company opened 20 new accounts in the second half of 2020.

"We have been a certified Facebook Marketing Partner and Google Partner since 2018, which attests to our technical competency on the two leading platforms in the market. Our 2020 results were extraordinary. The health crisis caused companies to invest massively in digital communication to make up for losses in sales at brick-and-mortar sites," explains Kamp'n founder Charles Martin Laval. "In addition, because we are a Premium Facebook Partner, we are among the first to know about the latest technologies we can put to work for our customers."

€2 million raised

The rise of Kamp'n was also driven by a second fund-raising series in September 2019. "Provence Business Angels and ACG Management ‒ now Smalt Capital ‒ gave us two million euros to help us market our services more quickly to the international market and major accounts. The BPI has been with us from the start and we get great regional support from both the public and private sectors. For administrative, financial and business aspects, the Aix-Marseille area is the perfect ecosystem for starting a business and accelerating innovation," Charles Martin Laval asserts.

For Kamp'n, the goal is to expand its current team of 20 with another 10 employees by the end of 2021 in order to better handle the spike in demand, reach out to European markets and continue investing in R&D.

"At Kamp'n, the key to competitiveness is R&D. To ensure our solutions are always up to date with the latest development in our sector, we invest constantly, channeling nearly 50% of our sales back into R&D."

The latest solution developed by the start-up is "Kamp'n Express". This interface encourages customers to shop at physical points of sale with digital marketing operations. It is a boon in the current context, given that merchants and franchise networks have to get traffic back up in their stores.