The Exchanges

Q Yeah. Now looking at your bio, you should be on a yacht somewhere going up and down, you know, the British Isles enjoying life, not throwing your hat back into it and competing again. Why do this? Why is it exciting?

A Um, well, it's, it's the thrill of building something from nothing. So you start off with an idea, um, and it's an idea that my partner, uh, Greg Freeman is very much part of, of bringing to realization. So he's the tech genius. Uh, we have a Canadian office. He works out of there. He and his team, we also have a development team in Hanoi. So he and the team, um, you know, we come up with the ideas and then they bring it home for us, uh, is what we, what we're doing. We're actually in the process of splitting the company in two, and we're selling the ad server portion of the business off. And we're going to be focusing in on, uh, what we're calling a new company. We're spinning off called all one, which is unified reporting. And reporting is one of the biggest issues in the ad space and outside of the ad space, because you're dealing with multiple vendors and they're all sending you reports all in different formats, all with different headings. Um, and somebody on, on an ad team is trying to pull all that data together and make sense of it. Figure out how much money you made yesterday. Where did it come from? Where are you losing money? Where are you losing money on your marketing dollars? And all of that requires really in-depth reporting. Right now it's a very manual process where people are pulling data from multiple sources. Um, uh, what we do is we automate the, the collec…

AI assessment note: “it's the thrill of building something from nothing”

Q year. And on the low end at a three X that's, you know, four million, but obviously, you know, if you do it right and you get a bidding war or you have some unique technology and get much, you know, a little bit higher than that. That's great. Now that money, when you sell that, um, will you kind of plow that into the new company or you guys?

A Actually, yeah, we're, we're taking that money to, uh, to give us additional working capital to expand the sales and marketing team and also to add some additional technology, but really most of it will go into sales and marketing. We have a pretty solid technology team right now. We will add more people to it. We have some additional products that we want to add that we see a potential to automate even more of the process, um, add net. Ad management right now, and all right across the board from ad agencies to publishers to ad networks is still a very manual process, and a lot of, even though you hear a lot about programmatic buying, there's still people in there moving things around, and we really see that as a waste of human capital. We think we, we can really automate 90% of what folks are doing today, which is this rote work they do every day, uh, to maintain profitability. We think we can do it twenty-four-seven, Uh, with smart machine learning.

AI assessment note: “Actually, yeah, we're, we're taking that money to, uh, to give us additional working capital”

Q All right. What is pub vantage and what's the business model? How do you make money?

A So PubVantage was really begun as a way to, uh, pick up a piece of business that DFP, now known as Ad Manager, wasn't doing very efficiently. Uh, DFP is very good at direct campaigns and programmatic campaigns. What they weren't good at is helping, uh, publishers monetize their remnant space using ad tags. It's a problematic space that, uh, deals with a lot of, uh, tags that are called passback tags, and it's very inefficient. What we created was a universal passback tag that allowed publishers to handle five, 10, 20 different demand partners very easily and monetize that remnant space in a much more competitive manner, and that's really the, the space we went into. We also work with large ad networks who also use ad tags as their main source of revenue. And we are far more efficient, uh, in handling those type of tags than a DFP or any other ad server that's out there.

AI assessment note: “What we created was a universal passback tag that allowed publishers to handle”

Q understand the product. We've had a lot of ad tech folks on like bill wise and media ocean. They all talk about the same problem. So totally see the value there. Talk to me about, about growth again on the current product. Obviously haven't sold it yet, but you grew to about 30 folks. Well, how are you acquiring customers and fully weighted? What were you paying to acquire them?

A Um, well, it's, a lot of our is word of mouth, putting out in context within the industry, um, and we have one, uh, sales, uh, our business development person who's out there beating the bushes for it, um, but generally it's going to conferences, talking to our early networks. We don't have a big marketing team around, uh, the product, um, because it's, it's a hard product to explain to people. You really need to come into contact with them, which is very different for unified reporting. Uh, because most people, when they think of an ad server, they think of displacement sales. Nobody's giving up ad manager, formerly DFP. Uh, but we're not asking them to do that. What we're doing is supplementing their DFP and turning a part of their business that's inefficient inside of DFP into a very efficient, uh, revenue generator.

AI assessment note: “a lot of our is word of mouth, putting out in context within the industry”