-Originally posted on TINC Magazine-
Continuing our TINC Interview Series is Advanse, a local startup that specializes in dynamic web advertising so that companies can create ads that are more targeted and able to be updated, while also being able to track the effectiveness of their ads.
TINC: Startup vs. Growth Company AKA - What stage are you in? Series A (early stage) or Growth Mode?
Advanse was founded in 2008 and our technology has been in the market since 2009. We are in growth mode and starting to scale our business.
TINC: Give us your Elevator Pitch!
Advanse delivers the next generation of display advertising with Advanse Ads. Replace your static ads with automated dynamic ads that lift ROI and deliver new advertising capabilities. You get TRUE digital ads that give you full power of the web.
TINC: To quote your website, A true digital marketing solution requires that your ads be dynamic and capable of instant updates like our Advanse Ads. You want a Digital Marketing Automation (DMA) solution that will make your advertising processes scalable. Can you tell our readers more about the process and reach of the product or service you provide?
I believe that display advertising today is the only market today where doing something online is more expensive than doing it off line. The reason for this is because producing targeted digital ads is very expensive when you think of different offers, products, audiences, geography, creative treatments that an advertiser must consider. Then combine that with different technical format outputs for web, mobile and tablets and advertisers are dealing with millions of possible ad combinations.
The tools advertisers use to make digital ads has not innovated and kept up with growth. The extreme majority of all ads are designed and built with Photoshop
– a desktop software package that was born in the 1990’s to edit photos. Intuitively, continuing to use desktop photo management software to build digital ads for the cloud-based world we are in now makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. Static ads cost you more money and you get less performance.
These archaic production methods for digital ads are what keep display advertising from being a more scalable channel for marketers. We remove those barriers to make it scalable by automating the creation, distribution, and optimization process.
TINC: What industry would you most closely align your company with?
Advanse is a display advertising automation company that helps web publishers and advertisers in the digital advertising industry.
TINC: What are common problems you see with the companies that your firm works with? How does your firm work to assist businesses with these problems?
We typically see three types of problems that we help our customers and partners with.
Scale. If I am a web publisher or agency, the issue might be how to I reach and service more advertisers with less staff and costs. If I am advertiser, how do I test more iterations of my ads to find the best performing ones as cheaply as possible? How do I get localized ads that are more relevant to consumers than just a one size fits all ad?
Performance and Measurement. Because ads have been static images, there is an extremely limited set of data you can collect on them. Our system provides clarity into what’s working and what’s not through deeper measurement, tracking and auto-optimization.
New Digital Services. Online display advertising grew 23% in the first half of this year and is expected to pass search in spending by 2015. There are a lot of companies that want to capture a piece of that market growth or need to jump into it to replace revenue from eroding channels like print. We partner with these companies to bring our unique display advertising technology and benefits to their customers.
TINC: What makes you 'special'? How is your product different from the other guys?
We focus on providing value in three distinct ways to our customers. First, we make the process of digital advertising easier. We provide a user interface that gives visibility into the entire process from ad creation, distribution, tracking and optimization. We allow our users to think about building ads and campaigns and not technical nuance of iPad ads vs web ads vs mobile ads.
Secondly, we believe that optimal ad performance is achieved through better data. Our system can measure 100 or more variables in a single ad campaign. This deeper data set is then fed back into our optimization engine so the ads can self-correct for optimal performance.
Lastly, we provide new ad capabilities that are just not possible with static ads. We can localize content with a retailer’s store listings, or change product pricing by region. We can integrate other web content like videos, social media feeds, maps, or blog posts. We are even working on transactional capabilities such as scheduling appointments and eCommerce enabled ads that allow consumers to purchase products directly from the ad unit.
TINC: Who holds your top executive level positions? Why those roles?
Steve Krol – CEO
Jeff Belmonti – Vice President, Client Services
Mike Kowalchuk – Chief Technology Officer
TINC: When was your company established? What is the official founding date?
We incorporated in August 2008 and began full time operation in January 2009.
TINC: Our differentiator is that we’re more technical, we talk about business and we “cover the code” in our editorial. So that said, tell us about development platforms you may be using, or what you’re coding this in.
Like a lot of web-based companies, we work with open source technologies. We use PHP, HTML5, and Java for the application layer and MySQL and Cassandra share responsibilities in the data layer.
TINC: What is your technical approach that makes your software better? How are you getting the details right or working in a more optimized way?
I spent many years running project management offices for technology consulting companies so I was painfully aware of what can go wrong with technical development projects. And when you jump into a market as fast moving as digital advertising you can’t know all the answers ahead of time. So keeping a light weight development process that allows for rapid iterations is critical. We did not start off that way and it was something we had to work at and design into our architecture. We need to build speed into our process because we just can’t throw raw manpower at a problem and beat it with brute force. Keeping each of our technical teams small has helped us build a better system.
