By Allan Maurer
RALEIGH, NC – Online advertising is moving into what AIMatch CEO and co-founder Jeff Wood calls “The second phase,” in which advertisers who normally use traditional media increasingly move online.
AIMach, Wood says, is ideally situated to take advantage of that with its new set of tools aimed at facilitating that move on the part of publishers, ad networks and agencies.
He and co-foudners Ryan Treichler, CVO, and Guy Taylor, CTO, are all veterans of Accipter, one of the Research Triangle’s biggest software company success stories. It too brought a pioneering online ad technology to market.
It then sold first to CMGI in a deal worth $500 million, again in 2006 to aQuantive, and finally became part of Microsoft Advertising when MS bought aQuantive in 2007.
For more details, see the first part of this story:
Hearing about the pain points
Jeff Wood, CEO, AIMatch
Wood, Treichler and Taylor say they gained insights into the inner workings of the online advertising world all along the way.
From aQuantive, they learned an approach to product development they found effective, paricularly, being pro-active, not re-active in terms of adding features.
At Microsoft, says Treichler, “We had the opportunity to go in and talk to the top publishers in the world. They would tell me all their problems. The problem with Microsoft was that they wouldn’t do anything about it.”
Nevertheless, he says, “I had the opportunity to sit in front of people who could tell me all their pain points from a very high level perspective. That helped give direction to what we did (with AIMatch).”
And, now, for something different
This was the first time the three had the opportunity to build a new technology from the ground up, something that would directly address those pain points.
“It might be easy for people to think we’re doing what we did before,” says Wood. “But we’ve actually taken the equivalent of what publishers would have to get from four different providers and put it into one solution.”
The AIMatch tools, they say, do several things differently. First, they are aimed at helping publishers sell their direct inventory, the ad inventory sold by their own sales people rather than the remenant space available.
The concept, Wood explains, “Is to let the publisher make full use of all the data they may collect and squeeze the most value out of their inventory.”
The publishers, he says, can use the AIMatch business intelligence tools to inspect how their business model is performing and its sales management tools to oversee their sales team.
It allows managers to run simulations to see how change would affect business.
“We built tools for them to take their informationa and their intuition and come up with conclusions,” says Wood.
Talking the right talk
Ryan Treichler, CVO, AIMatch
Another feature of the products, says Treicler, is intended to give online publishers the tools they need to bring advertisers online in ways they are familiar with.
“There’s no doubt that 75 percent of the advertising guys are still not online,” Treichler says. “They want to come online, but they want to come online in ways they’ are familiar with. They want to buy audiences and they want to buy products.
“We’re giving them the tools to talk the way the off-line world does in buying advertising and it’s going to make it easier to sell.”
Wood and Treicler both say that the proliferation of mobile devices, social networking and broadband Internet, all point to exponential growth in the digitial ad space, that “second phase,” Wood talks about.
He says they deliberately held off going to market so the product they developed would be “in front of the market, not behind it.”
“It’s a very exciting time to be here,” says Treicler.
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Tags: Accipiter, aiMatch, digital advertising, Intennet/new media, NC, Startups
