In a press release, AdReady announced AdReady for Agencies, “a hosted, privately labeled display advertising platform” as well the addition of Brian McAndrews of Madrona Ventures to its board. Read the release.
CEO Karl Siebrecht of AdReady discussed the new ad platform focus and more.
AdExchanger.com: Is the new AdReady for Agencies display ad platform a strategic shift for AdReady? The company was focused on more mid- and long-tail solutions, no?
It is part of an ongoing shift that has been underway for a while now. When the company was founded in 2006, its initial focus was on delivering a self-service platform for long-tail advertisers. Over time, we’ve realized that our platform adds the most value for more sophisticated agencies and advertisers who are trying to manage campaign-level budgets in smaller chunks driven by narrow audience targets. Examples include airlines with lots of city pairs and a need to manage individual campaigns with unique creative for each target audience against each city pair, or manufacturers with co-op marketing programs across multiple dealers in multiple geographies. This also includes mid-sized companies with smaller overall budgets, but who also have the same sophisticated requirements of the top 100 spenders in the market.
Do you consider AdReady for Agencies a demand-side platform?
Yes. Few people realize it, but AdReady was actually one of the first demand-side platform integrations into the Right Media Exchange, and was also the first demand-side Google API integration for display/image ads, both in 2006.
Unfortunately, the DSP “box” has been drawn to focus on media/audience buying only and it excludes creative capabilities, so because AdReady has always had both media-side and creative-side capabilities in our platform, it has been difficult for people to figure out where to categorize us in the evolving landscape. But we’ve always been adamant that these two capabilities must be leveraged in tandem to truly unlock the potential of digital marketing. The beauty of the core DSP capabilities is that highly targeted audiences can be identified and purchased. However, if a marketer can’t actually send each narrowly defined audience segment a set of unique, targeted messages and then optimize and pick winners from them, then what’s the point? Getting a generic message to the right person at the right time doesn’t quite cut it.
How will AdReady differentiate AdReady For Agencies in the marketplace compared to other DSPs and ad network offerings?
Our customers tell us that our two main sources of differentiation are our creative tools which vastly lower their creative production costs and thus enable true “precision campaigns” (unique messages to micro-targeted audiences) to be created and managed cost-effectively, and the overall elegance/usability of our platform. On the latter point, because our platform has been out in the market for 3+ years and has been used by thousands of agencies and advertisers, we’ve got lots of experience balancing the need for power and sophistication in terms of algorithms, targeting capabilities, etc. with equally important need for great efficiency and ease of use.
Where will the new platform source inventory? Will it leverage exchanges, aggregators and ad networks and use RTB, for example?
Through our platform, our customers have access to all major sources of automated, aggregated inventory including Google/DoubleClick, Yahoo, RMX, AdBrite, ADSDAQ, and Rubicon, among others. We also enable integration with several targeting data providers like BlueKai and eXelate. Additionally, a big differentiator is that we also provide scalable access to inventory from top publishers like ESPN and Pandora that isn’t available through exchanges, via our unique technology partnerships with them.
What do you think Brian McAndrews of Madrona Ventures will bring to your board? You worked together in the past, correct?
As the former President of Atlas I worked for Brian for many years while he was CEO of aQuantive, and he’s been a great mentor. He’s been one of the leading visionaries from the early days of the digital marketing industry, and is a great partner in imagining how the next decade will evolve in the space and where AdReady can play an important role in that evolution. More than anything though, he brings a ton of experience and perspective on how to build a great, customer-focused business and I know he’ll help ensure that we keep this focus above all else as we continue to build AdReady.
By John Ebbert
