It’s the last day of the first edition of the TechCrunch Disrupt conference, and our awesome program continues to be, well, awesome.
Earlier this morning, we had Twitter inventor Jack Dorsey do a demo of Square, and we also had David S. Kidder, CEO of search advertising startup Clickable, show off a brand new product the company is cooking up.
Kidder kicked off by saying that there is tremendous potential in social advertising, which commands about 50% of ad spend in the United States today (the other half goes to search). Clickable sees friction in the marketplace, which makes things complicated for many advertisers, particularly first-timers, who don’t always know where to start spending their first dollars and what works best.
Kidder demoed an alpha version of the new product, dubbed The Master Campaign, which will basically allow advertisers to launch campaigns across a variety of search engines and social networks in one go.
Customers will be able to use the Web-based dashboard of The Master Campaign to indicate what they’re trying to achieve (branding or customer acquisition), set a monthly budget, define their target audience based on age, gender and location and enter keywords.
Clickable will then mine all that data and pre-build campaigns across Google AdWords, Microsoft adCenter, Yahoo Search Marketing and Facebook. Advertisers can tweak the settings, edit the ad copy if warranted, launch campaigns across all those platforms with a single click and get custom performance reports.
The Master Campaign will be launched in public beta in Q3 of this year.
NY-based Clickable launched at TechCrunch40 back in 2007, has since raised over $20 million in venture funding and has former AOL CEO Jonathan Miller on its board.
The startup said on stage that it now employs over 140 people full-time (and aims to grow by another 100 in the next 12 months) and has over 1,000 paying customers.