2013 Q2 Progress Ventures Quarterly Newsletter In This Issue: • Company Summaries • The New SaaS: Software AND a Service • EveryScreen Media: Media6Degrees Acquires EveryScreen Media to Target Mobile Devices • Skyword: Skyword Lands $6.7 Million Growth Capital Investment • Skyword: Skyword Appoints Robert Murray as President • Simpli.fi: Search and Display: A Lesson In What Works • Localytics: Localytics Adds Features To Complete The Picture For Mobile App Developers And Marketers • LocalResponse: Social Ad Targeter LocalResponse Shuffles Leadership • LocalResponse: Brad Keywell: It’s Never Win or Lose – It’s Always Win or Learn • Pixability: Pixability, Quad/Graphics, and YouTube Convergence
Transcript
2013Q2
Progress Ventures Quarterly Newsletter
In This Issue:• Company Summaries
• The New SaaS: Software AND a Service
• EveryScreen Media: Media6Degrees Acquires EveryScreen Media to Target Mobile Devices
• Skyword: Skyword Lands $6.7 Million Growth Capital Investment
• Skyword: Skyword Appoints Robert Murray as President
• Simpli.fi: Search and Display: A Lesson In What Works
• Localytics: Localytics Adds Features To Complete The Picture For Mobile App Developers And Marketers
• LocalResponse: Social Ad Targeter LocalResponse Shuffles Leadership
• LocalResponse: Brad Keywell: It’s Never Win or Lose – It’s Always Win or Learn
• Pixability: Pixability, Quad/Graphics, and YouTube Convergence
Dear Friends,
Each of our companies has been very active over the past three months, and we have summarized their accomplishments in addition to offering a more relevant collection of media coverage from the second quarter of 2013. Moreover, this issue will speak to a new trend in the marketing and enterprise sectors: redefining SaaS.
EveryScreen Media was acquired by Media6Degrees in June 2013. Media6Degrees is a data science company that uses advertising serv-ing logs and widely distributed pixels to inform media buying decisions. Media6Degrees creates scalable custom audiences for major marketers by identifying consumers who are connected to a brand advertiser’s existing customers, and are likely to share brand affinities. The acquisition will allow Media6Degrees to link mobile devices to web browsers in order to give marketers a deeper look into customer activity online through web, smartphones, and tablets. All 12 members of the EveryScreen team will join Media6Degrees.
Skyword continues to secure its position as a leading SaaS platform of content workflow automation, and obtained $1.6M in new business bookings in Q2. The company also raised a total of $6.7M in 2013 lead by Cox Media Group. The Progress team remains active in sourcing deals and partnership development for the company.
Simpli.fi has made significant strides with local media properties and search marketing agencies, which have shown great interest in the platform that brings together the efficiency and efficacy of keyword-based search marketing with the reach and brand impact of display advertising. By the numbers, Simpli.fi hit $1.8M revenue in June, exceeding their original goal. The company is also currently raising $10M of secondary capital for growth and full or partial exit options for earlier investors.
Localytics is currently hitting all of the company’s growth goals, including $1.5M in the pipeline and $750K in bookings for Q2. The company is also entertaining the idea of a series B fund raise in the second half of 2013 as they see great opportunities to scale their market opportunity.
LocalResponse’s former president Kathy Leake has assumed the new role of CEO, while founder (and now former CEO) Nihal Mehta has transitioned to executive chairman. The company continued growth into Q2 of 2013 and closed the quarter with $2.3M in revenue, and over $6M in bookings year-to-date. They have also worked with 260 unique customers, 25% of which are Fortune 100.
Trust Metrics has quadrupled sales in the first half of 2012 and now has 125 customers across pharma/heath, retail, financial services, luxury, auto, consumer, and tech and telecom spaces. The company is now EBITDA positive and should show first year profit in the high six-figures by the end of 2013
Pixability successfully closed a round of strategic funding with Quad/Graphics as of May 1, 2013. Since then, the company has had impressive growth, beating their projected quarterly numbers and benefiting from the addition of Art Ziedman (formerly at Google) as CRO.
The New SaaS: Software AND a Service
In the traditional software as a service (SaaS) model, the company manages platforms and infrastructure that run application software and databases for their client, all centrally hosted on cloud-based servers. SaaS offerings are typically accessed through a web browser, and are common forms of delivery for management, collaboration and development software, accounting, CRM, gamification, and virtualiza-tion tools. Last year, the SaaS market topped over $30 billion, with almost another $8 billion coming in from business process as a service (BPaaS), infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) companies, according to Forrester Research. The entire market is also expected to more than quadruple by 2020. With this seemingly endless market space, it is no surprise that there are more players jump-ing in every day. Unfortunately (and becoming clearer as more companies IPO) the profitability model of even large players might not lead
to healthy, sustainable businesses. Jason Cohen, founder of WP Engine & Smart Bear Software, highlighted the main reasons for these losses in The Unprofitable SaaS Business Model Trap, pub-lished in Venture Beat.
As Cohen noted, SaaS giant Marketo IPO’ed with high year-over-year growth, yet showed a 60% loss ($35M lost on $60M in revenue). This is a com-mon problem for companies in this sector due to high marketing, on-boarding, and start-up costs, and a long pay-back period on sales. Traditional software companies (now dwindling as a result competing directly with SaaS) charge a large initial fee for an enterprise deal and earn back all costs up front. SaaS charges a per month fee, which has potential to earn more in the long term, but only if client retention is high and healthy growth doesn’t outweigh the profits obtained from older clients (typically profitability begins after 12-24 months). The only way to be truly profitable in this model is market domination and, subse-quently, high retention with slow growth.
Figure 1: Forecast: Global Cloud Market Size, 2011 to 2020
Source: Forrester Research, Inc.
BPaaS
SaaS
PaaS IaaS
Recently, companies who have truly studied the space and taken note of the challenges faced by the first big players to IPO have started to off-set upfront costs by creating a new definition of SaaS: software AND a service. Microsoft Marketing Director Rajesh Kumar stated in a 2008 interview that the tech giant would compete with new SaaS companies by offering the best mix of options that businesses might need at any point in time—“on-premise or in the box software and the online services.” Now, more and more, companies in the marketplace are looking back on Microsoft’s original profitability plan and adopting it as their own. Up-sells and upgrades are also making their way into the market through companies like Salesforce.com and Workday, the latter of which even advertises their product as “Software and a Service: Workday + OneSource VHR = A Superior HR Experience for the Mid-Market.”
So, where will these companies fit into the quickly expanding market? It is likely that they won’t completely take over the category (note the plethora of companies already operating in the SaaS space on beta.industrymaps.com) but they certainly have a better chance of survival as investors look for higher margins and profitability moving forward within the space.
Thank you and, as always, please feel free to contact us directly should you have any questions.
Bob Geiman | EveryScreen Media CEO
EveryScreen Media is a mobile RTB technology and data
science company—with both white label mobile-optimized
DSP and DMP products. They have aggregated over 100
billion in mobile media impressions from 14 different
sources of supply and have built a series of tools (campaign
management, campaign optimization, reporting, rich media
ad building tools, real-time marketing information on
mobile RTB, real-time inventory forecasting) that enable
customers to programmatically buy, in scale, mobile impres-
sions (in-app, mobile web, and tablet) real-time.
For more information, visit:
http://www. everyscreenmedia.com
Media6Degrees Acquires EveryScreen Media to Target Mobile Devices
Written by Michael Learmonth | July 16, 2013
http://bit.ly/1ebVVNi
Media6Degrees, an ad targeting firm that mines big data to find prospects for marketers, is acquiring mobile data startup Every-Screen Media for an undisclosed sum.The deal will allow Media6Degrees to connect mobile devices, in-cluding their location, to web browsers, a difficult technical leap that will give marketers a bigger picture of what their customers are doing as they move between the web, smartphones and tablets.“All the data we get from web browsers is about to be doubled or tripled,” said CEO Tom Phillips.
Founded two years ago, New York City-based EveryScreen Mediais a mobile data provider that allows marketers to target mobile audi-ences without using their unique device IDs, the kind of personally-identifiable information that is troubling to privacy advocates and regulators.
The company, backed by Progress Ventures, has 12 employees, all of whom will join Media6Degrees, which currently has 100 employees. Moorehead Partners advised EveryScreen Media on the deal.Media6Degrees helps marketers find potential customers by match-ing characteristics of their current customers to those with similar behaviors on the web. The company takes data from clients like Hertz and Marriott Hotels to find others people likely to rent cars or book
hotel rooms. Media6Degrees then ranks those prospects so adver-tisers can bid on them in ad exchanges like Google’s AdX, OpenX, Appnexus or Pubmatic.
Until now that was mostly data collected from web browsers.“We know how to do predictive modeling connected to display,” said Media6Degrees president Penry Price, who joined the startup from Google in 2011. When you start to add location, check-out and in-store data, we can provide a broader opportunity for marketers that is much more than advertising.”
Media6Degrees is also looking to add data scientists to position it for a day when cookie targeting becomes either less reliable (due to wide-spread opting-out of targeting) or subject to new privacy laws. The company’s position has always been that they can learn more from anonymous data about what a person is likely to do than from demographic or psychographic targeting based on age, gender or stated preferences.
“We don’t care what they look like,” Mr. Phillips said. “We care what they act like.”
Founded in 2008, Media6Degrees has raised a total of $25 million from Menlo Ventures, U.S. Venture Partners and Venrock; its last raise was in late 2010. The company is profitable, but Mr. Phillips wouldn’t rule out raising additional funds to fuel growth.
Mr. Price expects to see more consolidation in advertising technol-ogy this year as funding dries up, investors look for exits and startups with narrow offerings are rolled up by bigger players.
“I think consolidation is bound to happen but I have not seen a lot of standalone mobile businesses come running out of the gate,” he said. “It is still about downloading apps and that is not going to transform marketing.”
Tom Gerace | Skyword CEO
Skyword is the leading content production platform. The
Skyword Platform enables brands, retailers, media com-
panies, and agencies to acquire and engage customers by
efficiently producing quality content optimized for search
and the social web. Skyword for Agencies is an offshoot
of the Skyword Platform designed to meet the specific
needs of marketing and advertising agencies that manage
content programs for multiple clients. Quality content is
essential for reaching and engaging consumers today, but
the creation process is messy, inconsistent and immeasurable.
The Skyword Platforms make it easy to produce, optimize,
and promote content at any scale to create meaningful,
lasting relationships with customers. Skyword is a privately
held, privately funded company headquartered in Boston,
Massachusetts. Investors include Allen & Company, Progress
Ventures, Cox Media Group, and American Public Media
Group.
For more information, visit http://www.skyword.com.
Skyword Lands $6.7 Million Growth Capital Investment
Written by Andrea Wasik | May 17, 2013
http://bit.ly/1bLppGa
Investment Accelerates Aggressive Growth to Meet Rising Global Demand
BOSTON, MASS. — May 17, 2013 — Skyword, the leading platform for quality, original content production at scale, today announced it has closed $6.7 million in growth financing led by Cox Media Group. The investment will be used to expand the team and help scale the company to meet increasing customer and partner needs as content marketing becomes an integral part of brand marketing initiatives and digital content production for media companies.
“We see tremendous market opportunity for Skyword. With its powerful combination of visionary leadership, innovative technol-ogy, extensive writer network, and blue-chip customer successes, the company is poised for explosive growth as agencies, brand market-ers and media companies increasingly look for ways to use quality, original content to reach and connect with consumers in a digital era,” said Shereta Williams, vice president of corporate development, Cox Media Group.
The Skyword Platform streamlines and automates the critical steps in the content creation and publishing process and provides market-ers and publishers unmatched content intelligence. This includes the
SEO scorecard assessment to ensure content will earn high search rankings, streamlined content promotion across various social chan-nels, and the ability to track real-time search engine referral infor-mation so marketers can map content creation strategies to trend-ing topics and stay ahead of industry developments. Skyword also collects search/social performance data, allowing users to continually improve content offerings based on the customers’ needs, and pro-vides complete transparency into the editorial process with access to a network of thousands of professional freelance writers.
“We are in the midst of a perfect storm in the digital information era. Today’s converged media landscape and the evolving relationship between brands and consumers are driving marketers and publishers to rethink their tried-and-true strategies and invest in new technol-ogy solutions to better connect with customers,” added Tom Gerace, founder and CEO of Skyword. “Cox Media Group continues to be a strategic partner in our growth as we push to reshape the industry.”
Skyword’s Board of Directors is chaired by Jim Manzi, former CEO of Lotus Development Corporation and current chairman of Thermo Fisher, and includes: Shereta Williams, vice president of corporate development for Cox Media Group; Former Senator Bill Bradley, currently of Allen & Company; Bill Kling, founder and President Emeritus of American Public Media Group; and Tom Gerace, founder and CEO of Skyword.
About Cox Media GroupCox Media Group, Inc. is an integrated broadcasting, publishing, di-rect marketing and digital media company that includes the national advertising rep firms of Cox Reps. With $1.8 billion in revenue, the company operations include 15 broadcast television stations and one local cable channel, 85 radio stations, eight daily newspapers and more than a dozen non-daily publications, and more than 100 digital services. Additionally, CMG owns and operates Valpak, one of the leading direct marketing companies in North America. For more information about Cox Media Group, please check us out online at www.coxmediagroup.com.
Skyword Appoints Robert Murray as President
Written by Andrea Wasik | May 24, 2013
http://bit.ly/16FqPeb
Seasoned Digital Agency Executive to Drive Rapid Growth and Scale Company Globally
BOSTON, MASS. — May 24, 2013 — Skyword, the leading platform for quality, original content production at scale, today announced the appointment of Robert Murray as President. In this newly created position, Murray will lead the strategic growth plan for Skyword’s continued expansion to meet rising market demand.
Recently closing $6.7 million in growth financing, Skyword has become a dominant force in the content marketing arena. Given Murray’s proven track record scaling high-growth startups into global powerhouses and experience leading one of the top digital performance agencies in the world, his direction will help Skyword aggressively expand its reach while continuing to deliver solutions that empower brand marketers, agencies and publishers to produce quality content that reaches today’s consumers via search and social channels.
“Rob brings extensive digital marketing leadership experience to his new role at Skyword, with a specialty in building and leading high performing global teams. His skillset will help us quickly ramp up operations to support our continued global push,” said Tom Gerace, founder and CEO of Skyword. “His understanding of startup and agency cultures, growth-focused mentality and passion for digital customer engagement, social media, search engine marketing and innovative technologies is the perfect fit for our growing executive team.”
Before joining Skyword, Murray was Global President of iProspect (now part of Dentsu), overseeing the growth and expansion of the brand in the United States and around the world. The agency grew to more than 1,725 employees in 55 offices across 40 global markets during his tenure. He also served as CEO of iProspect U.S. from 2007 to 2009 and President of iProspect from 2000 to 2006, leading the company through numerous acquisitions and intense market growth.
Prior to iProspect, he served as a consultant for Bain & Company.
“The opportunity to work with the Skyword executive team to scale an amazing company in one of the fastest growing digital markets was something I could not pass up,” noted Murray. “Solving a major market need, Skyword helps agencies, brands and publishers crack the content marketing conundrum through its best-of-breed tech-nology solutions. I’m looking forward to helping the company grow both its solutions and its team to become a global force.”
Murray was named to BtoB Magazine’s “Who’s Who in Search” for four years in a row (2008-2011). He serves on the Board of the Ad Club of Boston and DMG (parent corporation of ad:tech and iMe-dia). A recognized industry thought leader, Murray regularly speaks at key industry conferences such as ad:tech, OMMA, Search Engine Strategies, and Search Marketing Expo, and is frequently quoted in leading publications on the changing digital marketing arena.
Murray earned a master’s degree in business administration from Harvard University and a bachelor’s degree in business administra-tion from the Carroll School of Management Honors Program at Boston College.
Frost Prioleau | Simpli.fi CEOSearch and Display: A Lesson In What Works
Written by Frost Prioleau | May 9, 2013
http://bit.ly/15wSIGi
Search advertising is widely considered to be the gold standard of on-line advertising. One measure of success is that search has achieved recurring line-item status in the advertising budgets of almost all major advertisers. Another measure is that despite consuming only 4% of consumers’ time online, search accounts for 46% of internet ad revenues, according to the IAB Internet Advertising Report. Display, on the other hand, generates only 33% of Internet ad revenues, despite consuming almost all of the remaining 96% of time that users spend online.
While highly successful, search does have some significant limitations. Limited frequency is one issue, in that advertisers only have the op-portunity to communicate with prospects at the time of their search. Another issue is search’s limited effectiveness as a branding tool, as search ads consist of several lines of text, mostly without graphics or animation.
This is where display advertising enters with its broad reach, high frequency and wide-ranging graphical capabilities. Exchange-traded display, real-time bidding , demand-side platforms and the like have the potential to combine the effectiveness of search with the reach and brand impact of display. But display still has a long way to catch up with search in terms of advertiser spend.
Simpli.fi is the full-service demand side platform (DSP)
that brings together the best of search and display in one
unified platform. In addition to its unique keyword-level
search retargeting solution, Simpli.fi provides a full suite
of targeting options including site retargeting, contextual
party data targeting, and more with massive reach in both
North America and Asia.
For more information, visit http://www.simpli.fi
So what lessons can display advertisers learn from search to become effective and attract more budget? Here’s a look at a few of the most important lessons.
Benefits Of Unstructured DataIn search, marketers can target against unstructured data. Instead of using fixed, prepackaged audience segments, search marketers can easily create custom audiences, continuously monitor the volume and effectiveness of each audience element, and – via keywords – optimize on the fly at the element level. The ability to bid, report and optimize at the keyword level has been a huge component of search’s success, and most search marketers wouldn’t dream of operating without this capability.
While unstructured data targeting is available in display, many ad-vertisers are still targeting against prepackaged, opaque audience seg-ments. By working with prepackaged audience segments, advertisers combine good data with bad and new data with old, without any vis-ibility into how each individual data element performs in combina-tion with different creatives and campaigns (Note: similar-looking data can perform very differently).
Advertisers can make their display campaign perform more like search by moving from prepackaged audience targeting to unstructured data targeting. This is available not only in search retargeting but also in site retargeting, CRM data targeting and other methods. By leverag-ing unstructured data, advertisers can direct their budgets to the best performing data elements and eliminate spend on underperforming elements. They will also gain deeper insights into their audiences that will help craft future marketing efforts.
Importance Of TimingAnother reason that search has been highly successful is timing. Search ads are delivered immediately after prospects display their in-tent by entering a search query. While this is almost always a good time to show an ad, it is not the only time when showing an ad is effective.
The effective timing window for showing ads varies with the prod-uct being advertised. For example, someone searching for “emergency plumber” is likely to make a quick decision about a provider and then be out of the market. It would likely be ineffective to serve ads to this
user even 24 hours after their search. On the other hand, someone searching for a longer consideration item, such as “cheap home mort-gage,” will likely take a longer time to decide on a provider, and it may make sense to serve them an ad a day, a week, or even a month after the search.
While display brings the ability to communicate with a prospect well after a search event, varying the recency window of when display ads are delivered is critical for success. Data has proven, time and again, that recency is almost always one of the top factors impacting cam-paign performance.
Data Quality MattersA third major factor in the success of search marketing is the quality of the data. The quality of data used in search marketing is uniformly high; as it’s the result of a proactive action by the user, it’s directly tied to the user who will see the ad, and it’s immediate.
The data used in display varies widely in effectiveness, cost and reach. Search retargeting uses the same intent data that is used in search, with varying recency windows. Site retargeting, for example, uses very direct data about the sites and/or product pages visited. Contextual data targets users based on the current page that they are viewing. CRM data targets users based on online or offline customer interac-tions. Meanwhile, demographic and social targeting bring the advan-tage of large-scale but are not directly tied to the actions of a browser.So what can a display marketer learn from search regarding data qual-ity? Depending on the goals of the campaign, all of the above data types can be highly effective. The key is transparency into the data elements, so that the advertiser can understand exactly which parts of the data are working and which are not.
Display has come a long way in the last few years and continues to close both the spending gap and the effectiveness gap with search. Moving towards unstructured data, variable recency and data trans-parency are just three ways with which marketers can move their dis-play performance to the level of search. Even better, time spent on these efforts will also help them succeed in the quickly accelerating fields of mobile and video.
Raj Aggarwal | Localytics CEO
Localytics is the leading marketing and analytics platform
for mobile and web apps. Localytics works with some of
the world’s most well-known brands, like eBay, Salesforce,
Microsoft and The New York Times, helping them create
great experiences for their customers and maximizing prof-
itability, engagement, lifetime value, and loyalty. Localytics
provides analytics and marketing for more than 850 million
devices across more than 20,000 apps. Localytics’ headquar-
ters are located in Boston, MA.
For more information, visit http://www.localytics.com
Localytics Adds Features To Complete The Picture For Mobile App Devel-opers And Marketers
Written by Darrell Etherington | May 8, 2013
http://tcrn.ch/13orGBz
Boston-based Localytics is fleshing out its mobile app analytics and marketing platform in a major way today with a variety of new features to help not just with customer acquisition, but also with monitoring and maintaining customer relationships over the lifetime of an app. The three big new areas Localytics now addresses with its platform are Lifetime Value Tracking, Customer Acquisition Management and Real-Time Funnel Management, all of which serve to help determine long-term engagement value.
Localytics is introducing these new features based on the theory that most marketers spend all their time and money on the front end of the sales cycle, getting people to download the app, and then aren’t really concerned about whether that person will become a quality user over the long term. If you’re used to web marketing trends, it’s like the difference between a low value visitor who comes in from search traffic and doesn’t stay long, and one who is referred by a trusted source and has a much higher chance of becoming a repeat customer. Most web properties, including our own, now value metrics like time spent on page whereas before they cared only about getting page views.
Paying attention to the entire cycle is a key competitive advantage for Localytics, according to CEO Raj Aggarwal, who explained in
an interview how it helps his company offers something that mobile marketers won’t be able to find at most of its significant competitors.
“Unlike other vendors in this space, the latest additions to our platform allow our customers to close the loop of the entire customer lifecycle within apps – from acquisition, to funnel optimization to tracking the total customer lifetime value,” he said. “App developers can then leverage that insight to interact with users in a personalized manner and customize the content they receive. No other vendor can deliver the combination of deep insight and action within apps.”
The new features help Localytics users identify which customer segments are driving the most revenue and profit, target the most valuable users with tailored advertising and acquisition outreach efforts, and provide in-app messages aimed at those users. It can also bring in Facebook advertising spend data, and provide long-term looks at how marketing campaigns are shaking out. Finally, there’s more information about how conversion funnels are working to turn people into paying customers, with real-time insights and long-term tracking of the efficacy of any changes made to the process.
This isn’t just good for companies, Localytics argues, but ultimately benefits the consumer, too, since it enables developers to create a better app experience that’s more likely to meet a user’s needs. “The benefit to the end user is that the user will receive a much better experience as the developers can tailor and personalize the app based on a granular understanding of the user’s preferences,” Aggarwal says.
Localytics is essentially trying to move away from a siloed approach to analytics, and providing a more thorough look at an app’s marketing life style is just the first step. Ultimately, the company says that its goal is to help mobile analytics drive real action throughout an organization, not just as it relates to apps, and helping to turn data into a more holistic picture of how a mobile experience can affect a business at the macro level.
Kathy Leake | CEO
Social Ad Targeter LocalResponse Shuffles Leadership
Written by John McDermott | July 23, 2013
http://bit.ly/17mfz5D
Founder Nihal Mehta Cedes CEO Role to Agency Veteran Kathy Leake, Who Will Shop the Company
LocalResponse -- the ad tech startup that helps clients Coca-Cola, L’Oreal andVerizon target consumers based upon their social media activity -- has changed its leadership structure. Founder (and now former CEO) Nihal Mehta has transitioned to executive chairman and former president Kathy Leake has assumed CEO duties.
Mr. Mehta will continue working for the company, but in a broader, more strategic capacity while Ms. Leake will handle all day-to-day responsibilities. Specifically, Mr. Mehta will be looking at establishing more brand partnerships and “soft-checking the market” for a potential acquisition for the company, Ms. Leake said. She added that there are no immediate plans to sell, and any such exit is more than a year and a half away.
Both said the change was a natural progression given the company’s recent growth.
“This is a passing of the baton, essentially,” Mr. Mehta said. “I got the company to this place and now Kathy has the experience to take it to
LocalResponse operates a social advertising platform that
allows businesses and brands to reach customers by re-
sponding to cross-platform check-ins. Its Web application
enables businesses to manage and respond to customer visits
via social media, as well as aggregates real-time check-ins
from social media services and provides an interface to
directly respond to those individuals.
For more information, visit http://www.localresponse.com
the next level.”
Ms. Leake joined the company in 2011 when it was Buzzd -- an app that aggregated check-ins conducted via location-based services such as Foursquare and Yelp -- and helped it transition to LocalResponse, a business-to-business ad targeting service.
“One of the reasons I was brought in was to pivot the company to a B-to-B company; take the same data set, turn it into an ad network and monetize all this data but for brands,” Ms. Leake said.
Ms. Leake brings ample agency and worldly experience to the CEO role. Her previous work includes stints aat DDB in Los Angeles, Ogilvy in Prague and at Agency.com in London, she said. Prior to joining LocalResponse in 2011, she worked at Media6Degrees.
Her plans for LocalResponse is to strengthen its cross-device targeting capabilities, a potentially lucrative but nascent and imprecise practice, currently.
“We were focused solely on mobile a year ago, and we were able to make the connection between social and desktop and we see cross-platform as a huge opportunity,” she said.
LocalResponse helps brands target consumers across devices based upon the “declarative statements” they post on social media such as Facebook posts, Pinterest pins and tweets. If a consumer uses her smartphone to tweet about having poorAT&T service, LocalResponse can help Verizon serve an ad to that consumer when she starts surfing the web on a desktop, for instance. LocalResponse collects data from the Twitter firehose and AddThis, a social media widget provider for more than 14 million Internet domains.
The company’s revenue run rate is in the millions and is nearing profitability, Mr. Mehta said. He added that company’s revenue has grown 400% from this time last year. In addition to his executive chairman role, Mr. Mehta will continue acting as founding partner at ENIAC Ventures, a venture firm that exclusively invest in mobile tech companies, and helping his wife Reshma Saujani in her campaign for New York City public advocate.
“I’ve been in mobile for 13 years, and we’re in the second inning of
mobile advertising,” Mr. Mehta said. “One big issue still yet to be solved is ROI and attribution on mobile. There needs to be ways to prove out ROI and attribution. That is the key to unlocking massive mobile ad budgets.”
Brad Keywell: It’s Never Win or Lose – It’s Always Win or Learn
Written by Brad Keywell | May 13, 2013
http://on.wsj.com/17UV7e9
Nihal Mehta launched real-time city guide buzzd in 2007, raising about $4 million in venture funding and drawing about two million users. But in an era before the smartphone craze, he struggled to find a great mobile revenue model. By mid-2010, he was forced to slash his staff by more than half and personally float payroll.
While buzzd was on its deathbed, Mehta took the time to fortify the relationships he had built over the years. He persuaded investors to convert their preferred stock to common stock and reconstituted the board – all while selling them on a new product that would help connect brands almost instantly with targeted consumers.
There is no winding down for entrepreneurs. There’s only winding up. Rather than just accept defeat and pack it up, Mehta raced to figure out how to preserve capital, modify his vision and refocus his efforts.
See what other mentors have to say about winding down a failing business.While the media may describe your struggling company as “failing,” the only way you can truly fail is by bringing your venture to a complete stop. You should try to never hit zero mph – just slow down the pace enough to catch your breath and gather all the hard work, talent, relationships and personal equity that you have worked so hard to build. Then take all that you can gather from the startup experience of disrupting a targeted industry and figure out how those assets can best be used to build something new.
Mehta did just that. LocalResponse rose from buzzd’s ashes, raising an estimated $7 million in 2011. And now major companies — ranging from Coca-Cola to McDonald’s to GMC — use LocalResponse in
harmony with social media to find and reach potential customers. For example, if someone tweets about being hungry, an ad for Pizza Hut appears. Or if someone posts a status update about hating tax season, a TurboTax ad shows up on their screen.
Can’t figure out how to pivot from a less-than-successful trajectory into a more promising business model? The real asset you could be sitting on is a talented and harmonious technology team — a team that could work miracles as part of another organization. Consider being acquired, because it’s rare to find the trifecta of great talent, people and teamwork in one place. Just look at Yahoo. Last week it bought MileWise and GoPollGo, just to have them shut down and roll their staff into the Yahoo mobile team. Yahoo did the same thing last year when it acquired Stamped, and it spent millions of dollars to retain all but one of the staff at San Francisco’s Web-clipping startup, Snip.it. Others, such as Facebook, are also in the market for buying the talent and tech percolating from the startup world, so don’t write off acquisitions when trying to salvage your efforts.
The personal investment you make in your company should pay entrepreneurial dividends, regardless of whether you make millions or don’t make much money at all. Do not allow your startup relationships to voluntarily dissolve with your corporation. There is a reason people believed in you as an entrepreneur, and your job is to harness that entrepreneurial spark even if your current venture is not a champion. Every successful entrepreneur and investor knows that it’s never win or lose — it’s always win or learn.
Pixability is uniquely positioned to help businesses drive
better YouTube results with a fully deployed content
marketing platform to optimize video assets and big data
audience analysis and media buying tools to help advertisers
find the right audience, in the right place, at the right time.
Pixability has over 500 customers and markets to medium
and large businesses online, direct, and through digital ad
agencies. The company is led by a team of experienced
technology entrepreneurs: CEO and Founder Bettina Hein
previously co-founded and led SVOX AG, a Swiss-based
venture-backed speech software company sold to Nuance
for $125M.
For more information, visit http://www.pixability.com/
Bettina Hein | Pixability CEOPixability, Quad/Graphics, and YouTube Convergence
Written by Rob Ciampa | May 1, 2013
http://bit.ly/1cqoCbn
Today, a big, classic media house bet on YouTube. Quad/Graphics, arguably a major player in traditional print and direct media, is mak-ing a bold and major push into YouTube. So what’s going on with the company that prints some of the most famous magazines and nearly all the top catalogs? For some time now, they’ve been quietly experi-menting with online video, proving that it not only integrates well with legacy media, but that it also delivers very impressive commerce results. Consequently, Quad is about to make a full-scale, online video push by: Leveraging its footprint and changing the economic equation around video production Investing with and partnering with us, Pixability, a YouTube-certi-fied marketing and advertising software company in Cambridge, MA
Joel Quadracci, CEO of Quad/Graphics and Bettina Hein, Founder and CEO of Pixability provide some insight on the partnership.http://bit.ly/13459GIWhy does this matter? Because too many companies just don’t get it when it comes to video and YouTube and are squandering a tre-mendous digital marketing channel for both brand awareness and commerce. Instead, these organizations are spending way too much
money while producing way too little content, hoping that if they put some mediocre video on YouTube, then some viral video magic will suddenly happen. Sorry, but that approach is just not going to work. Ever. As we’ve all heard: hope is not a strategy. Quad/Graphics knows that and has decided to team up with Pixability to shake up the video market. So how did this come about? You may find the journey insightful.
Quad engaged us first as a customer; not just a typical customer, but also one with the most intense desire for video marketing we’d seen. It was evident they had bigger plans – and they were doing their homework. As time progressed, additional Quad personnel got in-volved and more details of their video strategy emerged. They weren’t merely a printer; they were a content machine. I was surprised to learn that Quad was involved in all aspects of production including content for the catalogues, copy, photography, layout – the full prod-uct management spectrum. I toured one of their many worldwide facilities where they ushered customer along the content lifecycle. They were weaving video into the mix because they had the facilities, the financing, the desire, and the customers to pull it off.
But something was still missing: video marketing. It wasn’t about Quad being able to produce great videos for their customers. They wanted to determine:
What does audience of their brands watch on YouTube? What types of videos should their brands produce? What should the content composition be? How should the content be organized and structured? Is there an audience or community for their content? Which videos will drive sales?
Quad found out what major brands, e-commerce companies, and many of the world’s leading agencies know: Pixability had the techni-cal horsepower and expertise to answer these questions with both data and precision. Quad also knew that its integration of video production and marketing was already yielding a 30-40% increases in sales. Now that’s a big deal. Imagine what will happen when there’s one video per SKU, which they can now pull off. I think Quad just came to Cambridge and got its Ph.D. in YouTube.
B o s t on O f f i c e : O n e Bro a dw ay, 1 4 t h F l o or, C ambr i d ge , M A 0 2 1 4 2 , P h on e : ( 6 1 7 ) 4 0 1 - 2 7 0 0 New York Of f ice : 245 Park Avenue, 27th Floor, New York, NY 10167, Phone: (212) 609-6914
