An Unconventional Set of Financing Paths: SRAX Founder Chris Miglino (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: If you look back on that journey, what strategic levers did you push that were particularly good?

Chris Miglino: You can walk into any ad agency in 2008 and 2009 and just say you have something on Facebook. They would throw money at you to test it out.

Sramana Mitra: To understand what was going on.

Chris Miglino: Yes. $100,000 here. $200,000 there. We were very active in selling social interactions to the brand advertisers. It helped us build a lot of relationships with those brand advertisers. Over the course of those next few years, they became very educated about social media themselves and got much smarter about how they were buying and required a lot more tools and information around what they were buying and getting. We made that transition in that process to build tools that could help those brands understand what they were getting and what they could do better on Facebook and on other platforms.

Sramana Mitra: Where does this bring us up to?

Chris Miglino: That was 2013. We did $5 million in sales. Then in 2014, it just kept growing to $15 million. 2015 was $30 million and then $36 million in 2016.

Sramana Mitra: This is currently a public company. It’s an OTC public company.

Chris Miglino: It’s on NASDAQ. Along the journey, we lifted the company to NASDAQ. There are a few different ways to do an IPO. There’s the traditional way that everybody’s used to. You can also take an OTC-listed company and build up enough shareholder equity.

Once you have enough shareholder equity and enough investors, you can then move from the OTC up to NASDAQ. We did that in the latter part of 2016. When we did that, we changed the branding of the company from Social Reality to SRAX because the company is much more focused around programmatic advertising. While social is one element of what we do, we’re focused on many other different verticals as well.

The company now creates buying tools for specific verticals of buyers. We have a big practice on the pharmaceutical side. We work with pharmaceutical companies to reach healthcare professionals so they can advertise their oncology or cardiology drugs to specific doctors. We have a data management platform that takes all that information about these doctors and matches them up with device IDs and advertising IDs to reach certain doctors at certain times with certain messages.

We do that same thing on the consumer packaged goods side. We help CPG companies build tools that allow them to track an ad being seen on the Internet and whether that consumer went to the store and bought the product. On the Internet, it’s very easy to track sales of a product from a click to a transaction, but it’s very difficult to track whether the consumer saw an ad and ultimately went to the store and bought a product.

Sramana Mitra: What is the distribution of the business between all these types of businesses that you’re talking about?

Chris Miglino: From a financial perspective?

Sramana Mitra: Yes.

Chris Miglino: We don’t break that out in our financials. Healthcare is a very healthy and fast-growing part of the business. The CPG part is also doing very well. We also have an automotive group and a sports-oriented group. We don’t break down the revenue for each of those businesses.

This segment is part 4 in the series : An Unconventional Set of Financing Paths: SRAX Founder Chris Miglino
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