Helping Publishers Monetize Premium Ad Inventory: isocket CEO John Ramey (Part 4)

Sramana: Was the core idea that resonated with TechCrunch the concept of helping core publishers sell their inventory directly via your platform?

John Ramey: That was a big part of it. Our audacious goal was to create a true platform, an infrastructure layer, for advertising. Direct sales for web banners is a microcosm on top of the platform. It solves a real problem for a lot of people.

Sramana: You had developed a very substantial long-term vision. What was your short term goals to help you develop your initial product for TechCrunch?

John Ramey: It was essentially direct sales based on the idea of ‘premium’. If you think of a magazine, the ads towards the front of the magazine are full page color ads and the ones at the back are smaller and less substantial. Media always wants to sell as much of their ad inventory directly as possible and let a network or clearinghouse sell the remaining inventory. That model has existed for a long time and was transposed to the online world.

A publisher like TechCrunch wants to sell as much of the front end ad inventory as possible. Unfortunately most of the technology developed today, such as AdSense, has been developed for the back of the magazine. Publishers that want to do direct sales have to deal with an incredibly intensive, manual, high overhead process. There are very few tools that actually work. That is the problem that we solved. We build tools that make that process easier than it has ever been.

Sramana: What is the long-term vision?

John Ramey: For lack of a better word, it is the platform. We are building the platform that will enable third parties to use it as well. Two months ago we announced the world’s first APIs for buying Class 1 guaranteed direct inventory. Real time bidding has grown a lot over the past three years. It has enabled programmatic buying at the back of the magazine. We are creating programmatic inventory buying at the front of the magazine. Third party tools, like software that agencies use, can surface the inventory from BuyAds.com for their inventory via their own software. It is not that novel. Data portability and APIs exist everywhere else. It just has not existed in the advertising space.

Sramana: In 2009 the vertical ad network trend was starting to find its footing. Glam Media had a similar analysis as you, but they have a very different solution. Several players in the vertical ad network space had also concluded there was too much focus on the remnant inventory space and not enough purpose on the premium. To sell premium advertising online you need a different type of sales force because you essentially have to sell brand advertising at 25 to 50 dollar CPMs. That is the direction that other companies took. Can you put your solution into that context? Would Glam Media use your product?

John Ramey: It is unlikely because they probably fancy that they do not need it. They did not build the infrastructure. At lot of AdTech companies are far too heavy on the ad and very light on the tech. That has been one of the systemic problems in that inventory. People think real time bidding is magical engineering. They are shocked to find out how much man behind the curtain stuff exists. The vertical ad networks did not solve the problem with technology. The solved the problem by displacing people into a centralized group of people in a single company. One of these companies was acquired several years ago. They had 200 employees and only 7 were engineers. In the ad world people had not been solving problems, they had been displacing them. Nobody had successfully applied technology as a whole.

Sramana: I see two problems in this space. First is the technology and platform required to manage the solution. Second is the sales issue because small companies cannot afford the sales force to sell premium media.

John Ramey: You are not incorrect. Those groups addressed those problems and some of them did it well, but they addressed the problems through people and not through technology.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Helping Publishers Monetize Premium Ad Inventory: isocket CEO John Ramey
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