Dan Agbo 
Evido’s Emergence in CIS Digital Advertising
September 2024 – Evido has rapidly positioned itself as a noteworthy AdTech startup across CIS markets, leveraging a unique role as a Meta Authorized Sales Partner (ASP) to empower local advertisers. The company, part of the Aitarget marketing technology group, provides in-market support and innovative tools for digital advertising across platforms. Gaining official ASP status meant Evido could offer advertisers in regions like the Caucasus and Central Asia seamless access to Meta’s advertising products with local billing and expert guidance. This partnership underscores Evido’s deep understanding of local market needs and its commitment to share global best practices in online advertising.
As a result, by 2024 Evido had established a strong presence in the CIS digital ad space, with teams on the ground in countries such as Armenia, Georgia, and others in the region. The startup’s mission centers on moving emerging digital markets forward by combining platform expertise, local knowledge, and technological solutions. Evido’s approach marries global platforms (from Facebook and Instagram to Google and TikTok) with local insight – enabling businesses to run campaigns efficiently under expert supervision. This foundation set the stage for bold in-house innovations, even beyond the core Meta offerings. One such innovation is the “Telegram Insider” tool – a 0→1 product development that exemplifies Evido’s agile product innovation in 2024.
Introducing Telegram Insider for Arabic Markets
In 2024, Evido expanded its vision to tap into new advertising frontiers – notably Telegram, a messaging platform immensely popular in various regions. Evido’s Telegram Insider project was conceived as a pioneering tool to help advertisers navigate Telegram’s fast-growing landscape, specifically focusing on Arabic-speaking markets in the Middle East. The rationale was clear: with Meta’s channels well-served, the next opportunity lay in connecting brands with audiences on Telegram, where conventional ad tools were lacking. Evido identified that many MENA-region businesses and media outlets congregated on Telegram channels, yet advertisers struggled to find reliable insights on this medium. Telegram Insider was built to fill this gap by providing a central resource for “precision ad planning” on Telegram.
The business purpose behind Telegram Insider was twofold. First, it aimed to generate regional visibility for Evido as an ad-tech partner in MENA, showcasing the company’s capability to innovate beyond standard social platforms. Second, it served as a lead generation magnet: by offering valuable data on Telegram channels, Evido could attract local marketers and agencies to its platform organically. In essence, Telegram Insider would draw potential clients in with insights, who might then convert into customers for Evido’s broader advertising services. “We help you identify the right channels and run campaigns with confidence” is how Evido framed the service. By demonstrating on-the-ground expertise in Arabic social media trends, Evido strengthened its brand among Middle Eastern advertisers. This strategic move was especially important as the company continued to diversify its client base following its ASP-driven growth in the CIS.
AI-Powered Language and Category Recognition
At the heart of Telegram Insider is a clever use of artificial intelligence to tame Telegram’s deluge of content. The tool employs AI-based language detection and content categorisation to filter and organize Telegram channel data at scale. Given that Telegram is a global platform with channels in countless languages, Evido built the system to automatically recognize channels in Arabic (as well as other languages like Uzbek for Central Asia) and classify them by topic or industry. This technology is crucial – it means a marketer can quickly find, say, popular tech news channels in Arabic or high-engagement sports discussion channels in Arabic, without manually sifting through unrelated content. AI models can accurately identify the language of social media text and even tag content by topic, which dramatically improves the efficiency of such a tool. By leveraging machine learning, Telegram Insider scans channel descriptions and posts to determine both the primary language and the thematic category of each channel.
The result is an intelligence platform for Telegram. Evido’s tool analyzes key metrics of each channel’s audience – including subscriber counts (reach), average post views, and engagement levels – all through an automated dashboard. Crucially, it focuses on Arabic-language channels, reflecting the target user base of advertisers in MENA. An agency in, say, the UAE can use Telegram Insider to discover which channels in its niche (be it finance, fashion, or gaming) have the most traction among Arabic-speaking users. This data-driven approach allows advertisers to make informed decisions on where to place Telegram ads or sponsored content. As Evido’s platform notes, having such insight means data-driven campaign planning is finally possible on Telegram. In short, Telegram Insider turned an opaque ecosystem into a more transparent one for marketers, by using AI to bring structure to Telegram’s unstructured content.
Driving Lead Generation and Early Traction
Beyond its technical novelty, Telegram Insider was designed with clear business outcomes in mind. By serving useful insights for free (or in exchange for contact details), the tool naturally fed Evido’s lead generation funnel. Within the first quarter of its launch, the platform was attracting on the order of 1,000 monthly visits, a modest yet meaningful level of traffic for a niche B2B tool. These visitors were not casual consumers, but mostly marketing professionals and business owners curious about Telegram advertising opportunities. As a result, Evido observed a lift in organic inbound inquiries – several interested prospects reached out to learn more about running Telegram ads or requested demos of Evido’s services after exploring Telegram Insider. In effect, the tool acted as a top-of-funnel content marketing asset, showcasing Evido’s expertise in an emerging channel and sparking conversations with potential clients.
Internally, the team tracked improvements in organic lead flow corresponding to the tool’s roll-out. Rather than relying solely on paid acquisition or the clout of the ASP badge, Evido was now pulling in prospects by offering something genuinely useful to the market. This was a strategic shift: it positioned the company not just as a reseller of Facebook advertising, but as an innovator in its own right. Even though the usage metrics of Telegram Insider started humbly, the quality of engagement was high. Many users spent time exploring channel analytics and returned for updates, indicating genuine interest. Over the first few months, Evido fine-tuned the tool’s interface and search capabilities based on user feedback, ensuring that the experience was aligned with what regional marketers needed (for example, adding popular regional channel categories and improving Arabic localization). These iterative improvements further boosted user satisfaction and, by extension, Evido’s credibility in the Middle Eastern market.
Maxim Borisik’s Leadership in Innovation
A key figure behind Telegram Insider’s success is Maxim Borisik, the product lead who shepherded this project from a back-of-the-napkin idea to a live platform. Borisik’s role was hands-on from day one: he not only championed the concept internally but also contributed to developing the core tools and algorithms that power Telegram Insider. Colleagues describe how he essentially operated as both product manager and architect, outlining the MVP (minimum viable product) scope and then working closely with developers to implement the AI models for language and topic recognition. This 0→1 initiative required a blend of vision and technical acumen – exactly what Borisik brought to the table. Under his guidance, the team opted to integrate readily available machine learning libraries for language detection and train custom classifiers on Telegram data to recognize content categories relevant to advertisers.
Maxim Borisik’s leadership ensured the project stayed aligned with business goals. He kept the focus on features that would directly translate into user value: for instance, prioritizing the accuracy of Arabic language identification and the relevance of category tags, since those would make or break the tool’s usefulness. He also instituted agile iterations and user testing early on, which was crucial given the novel domain. Thanks to this approach, Telegram Insider was delivered on a tight timeline and within budget – a notable achievement for a startup-level project. Perhaps most importantly, Borisik cultivated a culture of innovation on his team. The Telegram Insider project was something of a skunkworks within Evido, and its positive reception proved that the company could innovatively extend its service offerings beyond the standard ASP package. It stands as an example of Evido’s capacity to revolutionise AdTech products at the local level, turning a nascent idea into a functioning tool that both serves marketers and reinforces the company’s forward-looking brand.