Helping Publishers Monetize Premium Ad Inventory: isocket CEO John Ramey (Part 5)

Sramana: Are you saying that a small publisher could get on your platform and use your technology to sell directly without having a large sales force?

John Ramey: Yes, that is correct. The majority of our publishers do not have salespeople. Our largest ones do, but the point is that publishers can participate without having to use a sales force. We have publishers that could never have participated in premium sales before who are able to participate now.

Sramana: The world is swimming with unmonetized advertising inventory, both online as well as in mobile. If a remnant network is selling inventory, there is no differentiation. You can’t get premium pricing on the inventory if it is being sold by a network. Would you talk about that from the perspective of your solution? How does your platform represent smaller publishers?

John Ramey: We enable publishers to represent themselves. It’s as you described; when you are using a remnant ad network you are not differentiated. That is part of the problem.

Sramana: Who does the differentiation? How does your platform empower publishers to create differentiation?

John Ramey: The core problem from the advertisers’ perspective is transactional friction. To spend a dollar of brand advertising online costs 9 to 10 times more in overhead than for TV. Overhead for TV is 2 to 3 cents per dollar, while it is 28 to 30 cents per dollar for online. This is because of the manual intervention required because of all the permutations.

We are working with a major advertiser that spends $1 million a month. It takes that advertiser two weeks of paperwork to start doing business with a new publisher. That prohibits them from working with new publishers. It is a transactional friction problem. A typical media player has the luxury of including only up to two dozen line items in a campaign. They need to focus on the Twitters or CNN.coms of the world. By democratizing that friction, making it easier to find publishers and turning the two-week process into a two-minute one, the world is opened up and the tide rises for everyone. We help a small publisher by making it findable.

We had a media buyer from an ad agency call us on the phone. They needed to run a direct fashion campaign. The buyer went to Google, typed in ‘fashion blog,’ went to the first four pages of results, and contacted the ones that had advertising to attempt to work a deal. With us, they could just click through the publishers and add the ones they are interested in. In that process, all properties are differentiated because the publishers are the ones providing the details of their audience, inventory, pricing, and conditions. Each publisher represents itself and explains why it is differentiated. Advertisers can see that differentiation.

We power a blog that is the only blog that covers the voice-over talent industry. It does not have a large readership, but it is super targeted. If they were part of an ad network they would never be differentiated. With us it is a two-minute process. They are not making $2 million a year, but they are selling stuff, which they were not able to do before.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Helping Publishers Monetize Premium Ad Inventory: isocket CEO John Ramey
1 2 3 4 5 6 7