Capturing Intent In Non-Search Performance Marketing: Zephrin Lasker, CEO Of Pontiflex (Part 3)

Sramana: What was the premise behind Pontiflex?

Zephrin Lasker: The initial idea was almost like PayPal for use data. Most online ads will take you to an advertisers site once you click on that advertisement. Those are redirected ads. DoubleClick has built a pipe for redirect ads. That is a well-understood, defined space with a solid infrastructure.

However, before us, there was no easy way to transfer data. They had tried with XML but did not get enough results. We saw an opportunity for an advertising ecosystem for user data. It is important to note that it needs to be 100% opt-in user data. There was no standard for one advertiser to talk to another publisher.

Before PayPal, there was no method to conduct micro-transactions online. I could not pay you $10 for a book without sharing banking details. Today we can just use PayPal, which is the intermediary between our bank transactions. We have essentially created a similar service for user data.

Sramana: Where is the user data residing, and what is the model for using the data?

Zephrin Lasker: If a user is going through a site and sees one of our ads and they opt in, meaning they type in some information into that ad, then that data must go from the publisher site to the advertiser. The reality is that the ads are loading on thousands of different publishers. All of that data needs to be collated and delivered in real time to allow for rapid follow-up by the advertiser.

Our system moves 100,000 pieces of unique user data per day, and we have moved over 35 million since we launched two years ago. That is rapidly increasing as we scale out into mobile. Our solution lets marketing folks worry about marketing and not technology. They don’t need to have various tech teams make their own custom, integrated solutions.

Sramana: Have you been able to carry out that model, or have you had to adjust your premise over time?

Zephrin Lasker: Interestingly enough, we still do what our original premise was to do. That has become the data transfer engine, and it is the foundation upon which the business is built on. We have since built additional layers on top of that original business. We have a commerce layer that matches advertisers and publishers. There is an optimization layer that optimizes advertisers and publishers relationships based on ongoing metrics. Fundamentally, our first vision was correct. It was not every piece, but it was the most significant.

Sramana: When did you first have that original vision?

Zephrin Lasker: I started sketching it out on paper in 2004.

Sramana: Mobile advertising had not started very aggressively then.

Zephrin Lasker: It really picked up in 2010. It is growing so quickly that it is almost half of our business now. In our original business plan we did identify two expansion areas, which were mobile and interactive TV.

Sramana: Who was your first customer and how did you go about recruiting them?

Zephrin Lasker: Our first customer on the advertiser side was eFax. They were a legacy customer from my previous company, and they definitely helped us a lot. They were a steady customer for several years and we still work with them. We would get paid every time we generated a new eFax for a user. Our first publisher was Demand Media. At the time they were a relatively small company. They are a large publisher today, and we had no idea how big they would become when we first saw them.

Sramana: How does your business work? Do you have to recruit advertisers and publishers?

Zephrin Lasker: We work with advertisers and ad agencies. We have a direct sales team and a marketing department that produces white papers. We also actively develop our publisher side. We have thousands of publishers and will soon have thousands of mobile publishers as well.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Capturing Intent In Non-Search Performance Marketing: Zephrin Lasker, CEO Of Pontiflex
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