Ad-Juster announced a deal with software solutions provider Solbright which will allow Solbright clients “to automatically access third party delivery data from Ad-Juster for billing reconciliation and discrepancy management.” Read the release.
AdExchanger.com caught up with Ad-Juster CEO Mike Lewis to discuss his company’s positioning and the marketplace.
AdExchanger.com: What types of companies are buying your services right now? Can you identify specific verticals – and/or horizontals?
ML: Its difficult to identify any specific verticals or horizontals as thematic in our current customer base. We have premium content publishers using our system from almost all types, genres and sizes. Pretty much any company that’s serving third party ads as part of their revenue operations have seen tremendous value in what we offer them. Up until recently our focus has been on larger digital publishers, companies that often have
their own in-house ad operations groups. However, in the last several months we have expanded our view of the world and found that there is strong demand for this type of delivery performance measurement and insight among smaller publishers, ad networks, ad agencies, and even direct advertisers.
We provide value to our customers by paying attention to their work-flows and reducing “stove-pipe” system gaps between different organizational systems. Our current product has been well adopted by two primary areas of responsibility within our customer base: Ad Operations and Billing/Finance. We are working both internally and with potential technical partners to expand our integration of these stove-pipes to include the Sales and Proposal personnel, and see several great product offerings coming to market in 2010.
AdExchanger.com: It would seem Ad-Juster is a good fit for SaaS companies looking to leverage their infrastructure and clients with a distinct service in the ad space. Thoughts?
This is absolutely true and a big part of our mission at Ad-Juster. We don’t focus on re-creating technologies which exist and are successful in the market today. Rather we look to create products that make those existing products and services work better. We do this either by providing existing systems with more information to make better decisions or by connecting previously unconnected systems to remove the need for human data entry or transformation which is both time consuming and heavily prone to error.
In keeping with this mission we have just inked an integration partnership with Solbright to automate the ingestion of 3rd party delivery data into AdSuite. By removing the need for manual upload of 3rd party numbers, customers using both AdSuite and Ad-Juster will be able to monitor the true billable performance on a daily basis directly through their AdSuite interface. Customers will also be able to shorten their invoice cycle since end of month billable numbers (often 3rd party in origin) will no longer need to be manually uploaded before being pushed into financial back-office systems.
Ad-Juster remains committed to continuing to broaden our partnerships and help SaaS companies that deal in ad delivery data increase the accuracy, relevance and value of their products.
AdExchanger.com: Could your “Switzerland” positioning for Ad-Juster also be a good fit for management of behavioral data and data profiles?
ML: Early on we made a very measured decision not to tie our revenue directly to internal ad operations. This kept us free from taking sides in the equation between digital publishers and agencies/advertisers. We do not operate an advertising network and we don’t revenue share with any of our clients. We believe that our role in the market is as a conservator of data. We have gone out of our way to protect the integrity and privacy of our customers’ data. This trust relationship is crucial as we continue to observe an industry wide awakening to the value and potential dangers of enormous amounts data becoming more personal and more strategic in nature.
We hope that our position will give us the ability to provide valuable insight back to the industry as a whole while protecting the strategic value each customers individual data sets provide. But any path forward starts and ends with our commitment to protecting the information we have collected and transformed into actionable insight for our customer.
By John Ebbert
