With so many ad tech vendors to choose from, where should brands and agencies begin?
CartographAI, a new startup from two buy-side veterans, wants to help advertisers pick the right tech partners by using assessment criteria that weigh what media buyers actually care about, rather than publicly-available marketing materials.
CartographAI is the brainchild of former Goodway Group CEO Jay Friedman and Danilo Tauro, a former McKinsey analyst who also previously headed up Procter & Gamble’s vendor analysis and risk assessments. They told AdExchanger they launched the endeavor earlier this year to disrupt the industry’s traditional consultancies that advise advertisers on tech strategy as well as the analyst model that anoints certain companies as leaders in their categories.
Instead of compiling a one-size-fits-all list of what it believes are the top tech vendors in the industry like other analysts, Friedman said, CartographAI helps individual brands and agencies find the right fit for them, which might not always be the industry-consensus category leaders.
In addition to helping buyers compare different competitive solutions, a big part of the company’s value prop is simply breaking down what various tech vendors do in a more straightforward way than you can find on their websites. According to Tauro, some agencies who have tested the solution said, “It’s like the Lumascape, but you can double-click the logos.”
CartographAI’s vendor-ranking solution started as a brand- and agency-focused product, and those groups will remain its core constituencies, Friedman and Tauro said.
But the company is also launching an accelerator program to help tech vendors more effectively market their solutions to advertisers, it announced this week.
Marketing to marketers
The accelerator program has already assembled a roster of ad tech vendors, including The Trade Desk, Viant, MNTN, Adelaide, Optable, Chalice, Gamera, Clinch, Evertune, Eulerity, TAU, Bright Mountain, Version2, NativeAds, QRate and Narrative.
For between $1,000 and $3,000 a month, depending on the company’s size and growth stage, Friedman said, vendors can sign up to get “deep, analyst-level intel on your subcategory” on a monthly call with CartographAI and its team of subject-matter experts. These experts are drawn from Friedman’s and Tauro’s industry contacts, including from the Procter & Gamble digital alumni forum.
The experts give vendors insight, sourced from direct conversations with buyers, into what advertisers are looking for in their tech solutions, Tauro said. These insights can inform not only the vendors’ product road maps but how they market their solutions.
Plus, CartographAI will promote accelerator program participants on social media and in podcasts and newsletters, and vendors also get access to co-marketing opportunities with CartographAI at ad industry events.
The accelerator program is particularly valuable for helping an ad tech startup like Gamera, a media quality platform that launched in 2022, get its product in front of the right people, said its CEO and co-founder, Gareth Glaser. “It helps us identify the right contacts at brands, agencies, trading desks and everything in between without going through a long series of false starts, while also providing an objective, concise way to communicate what our product does and why it matters.”
Having that clear path into the buy-side market is one thing, Glaser said, but it also comes “with guidance from people who understand how to create the right conversations and, just as importantly, avoid the unproductive ones.”
Attention measurement platform Adelaide is early in its journey with CartographAI’s accelerator program, Adelaide CEO Marc Guldimann said, but the company already received plenty of valuable feedback on its go-to-market strategy during the onboarding process.
“Jay has a [Charlie-]Munger-like command of incentives in the ecosystem and Danilo is super strategic,” Guldimann said. “Advice and blunt feedback from a team with this kind of understanding of the market is invaluable.”
In addition, later this year, CartographAI plans to launch an AI analyst solution grounded on its industry expertise that will advise advertisers on which vendors can help them solve particular challenges or drive certain KPIs.
Given that planned rollout, Glaser said, “CartographAI is laying important groundwork for a future in which buyers increasingly use AI to discover, evaluate and engage with new technology partners.”
Ranking the vendors
Until the AI analyst launches, advertisers can access CartographAI’s vendor rankings through its website, which is live with about 1,000 rankings today and about 20 new company profiles added per month. The website rankings are free to access; clients just have to sign up for a login.
CartographAI groups ad tech vendors into different vertical market categories. For example, it has a category for DSPs and another for identity resolution/ID graph providers/DMPs.
It then ranks the vendors according to five criteria that are unique to their vertical market, labeling their offerings as either “emerging,” “capable” or “advanced” in each of those five criteria. For instance, the identity solution category’s criteria include match quality, coverage and portability, privacy and consent mechanics, activation utility and commercial and dependency risk.
On top of using the free site rankings, brands and agencies can also sign up for a more traditional white glove consulting service. Each of these deals is priced on a custom basis, with CartographAI charging between five and six figures for consulting, Friedman said, although it’s still solidifying the economics of this offering.
Once the company’s AI analyst is ready for market, it should help further streamline how brands and agencies run their RFPs when onboarding new vendors, Tauro said.
In his experience, he said, buyers can spend six-plus months evaluating new partners, with about two months spent simply learning everything they can about the particular product category. That’s why CartographAI prioritizes connecting advertisers with experts who are already knowledgeable about the different vertical ad tech markets – and why it’s training its AI on their expertise.
“It’s almost a marketplace of knowledge,” Tauro said. “The point is helping that translation between how marketers think, talk and operate, and how tech companies do.”
