There’s a classic problem in the ad tech and mar tech ecosystem.
Although there are tens of thousands of vendors across the Lumascape, helpfully bucketed by dozens of three-letter acronyms (CDPs, DMPs, SSPs, etc.), nobody has any idea what anybody does. And no company’s site or press release provides any help at all.
Blurbs is the latest startup to hopefully ameliorate this issue. The community management and discovery platform allows marketers to explore (and scrutinize) assorted ad tech vendors and point solutions. The company was founded by a trio of ad tech vets, Tom Gibbons, Tom Barbaro and Sean Simon, who worked together at PebblePost, a programmatic direct mail vendor.
The idea started organically as a side project, Gibbons told AdExchanger, because the group was so frustrated by how poorly described and understood were the mass of programmatic vendors out there.
“It’s only in the last six months or so that we were like, ‘Okay, this is a startup now,’” he said.
How Blurbs began
Blurbs grew out of an ad tech sales consultancy the co-founders started after leaving PebblePost.
That network, plus other marketers and ad procurement execs at DTC and enterprise brands became the early user base, Gibbons said.
The company hasn’t raised money yet. The three co-founders are also still the only employees. Gibbons said Blurbs likely could raise a seed round from industry angel investors or more orthodox venture capital firms. However, at PebblePost, he said, the group had experience with a startup that raised a great deal of money – more than they needed, he added – and regretted not having taken a more frugal approach early on.
The main issue that Blurbs is trying to fix is for marketers. There are seemingly endless and indistinguishable numbers of mar tech and ad tech vendors out there. But if a retailer is trying to improve email retention in the months before back-to-school sales, for example, they can use Blurbs to input a project’s budget and scope and end up with a curated, relevant set of vendor solutions. Some marketers, especially media buyers who have taken on more senior managerial roles, often end up losing the finger on the pulse of new tech and startups in the category, he added. Those execs also peruse Blurbs just to see what’s new and interesting, or if there are startups they should have an eye on.
On the tech side, Blurbs’ appeal is more straightforward: If that’s where even some big brand marketers are going to research and choose potential vendors, then the vendors have to be there.
The vendors are also, unsurprisingly, the revenue stream. Marketers don’t pay to join, but vendors have payment tiers and types of access.
The basic plan, which starts at $79 per month, puts vendors on the Blurbs map and allows them to be engaged by brands on the platforms. However, within each point solution category, like retargeting, email retention, catalog data enrichment, ad fraud and verification, et al., a vendor can also pay to be a “community champion,” Gibbons said.
Those vendors have chances to create their own user-generated content on the platform, including helping to frame how Blurbs presents each category or offers suggested RFP questions for marketers to use. RTB House (retargeting), Krateo (audience prospecting) and Metrical (ecommerce site optimization) are among the early community champion backers of the platform.
Vendors in general, he added, are concerned about how their businesses are described and potentially recommended or not by new generative AI search portals. Blurbs has an agentic layer like ChatGPT for brands to search but gives much more control to vendors over how their products are surfaced and framed to potential clients.
The money pit
At some point, Blurbs will have to add to its monetization toolkit if it wants to grow. But it’s a delicate balance.
G2, which is a business software review service (think Glassdoor but for buying SaaS deals), is the incumbent in the category, Gibbons said. But it’s been plagued by its own success. Once the platform’s recommendations and reviews became (A) a common research point for potential clients and (B) open to paid promotion, the reviews were flooded with uselessly positive or maliciously negative postings.
“We’re never going to have reviews,” he said. “A five-star review is horribly biased and useless.”
Although Blurbs does have other ways that vendors might purchase access and influence with marketers.
The idea of perusing a few reviews and seeing the average star rating might work for, say, choosing a nearby Thai restaurant. But it’s not how people would buy a car, Gibbons said. And SaaS or ad tech vendor choices are more akin to the car research and purchase funnel, rather than that five-star restaurant or some item on Amazon.
“You want to dig in,” he said. “It’s a considered purchase.”
The idea, Gibbons acknowledged, is actually quite similar to the original idea for Marketecture, an ad info resource founded by Ari Paparo, which early on was primarily a catalog and in-depth guide to the vendor ecosystem, since the all-around consensus is that no vendor has ever usefully described itself on its website or in a press release.
“There is still a lot of that need from buyers,” he said.
