Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Rob Jewell, Founder and CEO of Spruce Media (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: You needed to provide this service.

Rob Jewell: Yes. We had to build a layer of services on top of that to ensure our clients were successful. Our thoughts have always been that as these channels mature, clients tend to want to bring advertising in-house. We’re in the process of handing the reins over, so to speak, to a lot of our advertisers and licensing that platform and letting them manage it on their own.

SM: What is the minimum spending threshold at which you take clients?

RJ: It varies. Probably around $25,000 is the minimum buy.

SM: That would be $25,000 a month?

RJ: Yes, $25,000 a month. It depends. It usually comes in the form of an RFP, and if it’s a single campaign flight, the $25,000 will lead to more. We’d like to have an opportunity to do at least $25,000 to $50,000 a month with the advertisers we bring on. For the self-serve people, the market we’re targeting is people who are spending at $100,000 a month on Facebook.

SM: Those are the ones you’re licensing your technology to?

RJ: Yes. Large agencies, trading desks – we have people who spend millions of dollars a month on Facebook. We think our platform is built to take multimillion dollar buys and make them more efficient. They’re getting more bang for their bucks.

SM: What is your impression of where Facebook is going? Facebook is obviously a technology company, and it seems to want to do more and more for customers. Is this the kind of thing they’re going to bring in-house?

RJ: No. It’s as I said before, they know their limits. They’ve taken a very successful approach early on by becoming a platform and allowing apps to build on top of it. Some of the most successful apps are, for instance, Zynga. Entire companies have been built on Facebook’s platform. That’s benefited Facebook. Facebook was never going to build out social gaming. But I think the company’s taking the same approach to advertising. Facebook can launch a platform and have hundreds of businesses build on top of that platform. The primary beneficiary is Facebook. And I don’t think the company sees any reason to get into that business. Each business that’s built on top of Facebook advertising is good for Facebook, so the company’s always going to encourage it.

The second part of your question was where I think Facebook is going with its advertising. I think the company will continue to rely on its ads API partners, as it has in the past, and it will probably start to rely on them more, which is great. But on the other side of things, I think Facebook is going to be focused on making advertisements more social. There were some big announcements at the SMC marketing conference in New York – the first Facebook marketing conference – that encouraged brands, agencies, and their advertisers to sponsor stories, as they call it. It’s stories that are already happening within Facebook. Users who are already engaging with brands and pages on Facebook. Facebook wants to amplify that message and lean on that brand to sponsor the message. It becomes less of an ad where you’re just creating a random message for a consumer and more about sponsoring a story. You’re amplifying a message that a consumer’s already talking about – that brand – within Facebook. It’s an inherently more social ad; therefore, it leads to better engagement and better response. There’s an exciting shift happening within advertising on Facebook to more of those social context, sponsored stories types of ad units.

SM: I don’t think that will preclude banner advertising or CPM display advertising.

RJ: I don’t think so, either. I think they’ll always coexist. This will be advertising that is purchased also on a CPM and CPC. It’s just different-looking ad unit.

SM: I think they will get to monetize more of the mobile users using that strategy, which they don’t get to monetize much these days.

RJ: Absolutely. Those were two of the components of the announcement [at the marketing conference]. Those sponsored stories advertisements are going to be showing up in the news feed. Instead of on the right rail where all the ad units are today, they’ll be embedded in users’ news feeds both on their sites and also on mobile, which is really exciting. No advertising has ever existed on the mobile platform.

SM: I think what you’re doing is very cool. Thanks for sharing your story.

RJ: Yes, absolutely. It was nice talking to you. Thank you so much.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Rob Jewell, Founder and CEO of Spruce Media
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