Wix.com’s $100 million marketing budget and in-house advertising team

Most major brands hire outside advertising agencies to advise them on marketing and create advertisements.

But that’s not the case with Wix.com, the website builder site with 110 million registered users and an annual advertising budget of more than $100 million, according to its latest financial report.

He used an in-house team to come up with the idea for “Chef Felix,” his Super Bowl commercial this year, an action spot featuring actors Gal Gadot and Jason Statham that has been watched more than 5 million times. times on YouTube. The ad tops the list of most engaging Super Bowl ads ahead of the NFL championship in February and there’s a ‘strong chance’ the brand will be involved in the ‘biggest ad event’ of the year in 2018, according to the chief marketing officer. Omer Shai, who spoke to CNBC by phone.

Shai said the brand uses directors and production companies to make the ads, but the ideas are generated by the in-house team.

“We believe that marketing is part of the heart of the business, (it has to) sit close to the product and to tell the story you need a lot of depth, to understand the vision of the business and more again, and (it allows you) to act quickly and execute quickly,” he said.

Shai has a team of around 200 people, made up of designers, broadcast and community specialists, among others, and says people who use Wix.com include designers, photographers and small business owners. In August, he held a contest for a photographer to win a dream photo shoot – Japanese photographer Reiko Wakai won. She created a series of “Zero Gravity” images featuring model Stav Strashko floating in the air, taken from an airplane diving at a steep angle from 34,000 feet to create the environment of zero gravity.

Wix also worked with model Karlie Kloss on an ad showing her creating a website. “We really like telling the story through the product and with the users actually using it,” Shai said. It has also partnered with City Football Group (the parent company of Manchester City FC) in a deal which is in talks for a further two to three years, Shai said.

The CMO attributes the company’s creativity and efficiency to the internal approach. “Anyone can contribute, even someone doing acquisition (marketing) can come up with a creative idea,” Shai said.

He plans to increase the number of employees in the marketing team (there are currently seven vacancies referenced on his site) and said that Wix will double the number of projects it works on. This will lead to an increase in the advertising budget, with expenses listed in its annual report at $113.2 million for 2016 against overall revenue of $290 million. Shai will not be drawn on the amount Wix spends this year, but it will increase, he said.

Wix lets users build websites for free, then charge for features like increased storage, no Wix ads, and a custom domain name, with premium plans starting at £2.55 ($3.39) per month.

But does marketing convert people into subscribers? “What converts users from free to premium…is only if they are happy with what they have created, marketing is not responsible for converting users, the product is responsible “, Shai said.