TapHeaven Promises True Automation For Mobile Advertisers

The pitch for TapHeaven might sound a little familiar. Co-founder and CEO Chris Hoyt said his technology delivers truly automated ad-buying.

What makes TapHeaven more than just another ad startup that talks a big game about its technology? Well, it says it’s actually delivering big results with its first dozen pilot partners — many of them, Hoyt said, have seen their user acquisition costs fall by 50 percent.

He added that some of those advertisers have already switched to using TapHeaven exclusively, dropping their other demand-side platforms (those are the ad-buying platforms that allow them to work with multiple ad exchanges and data providers).

“The technology out there was very weak,” he said. “There’s so much wasted ad spend through the human-based processes that are rampant in our industry.”

TapHeaven is backed by startup studio ventureLab and it’s officially launching its Sonar Intelligence product today.

Given a lack of prior experience in advertising, Hoyt and his co-founders Jeremy Jones and Brian Krebs (pictured above) might not be the most obvious candidates to build a serious ad-tech company, but Hoyt pointed to Krebs’ background in enterprise technology, and he said that they developed TapHeaven by working closely with one of the top companies in mobile gaming. (Krebs said he can’t disclose the name of that company or of TapHeaven’s other advertisers.)

“Having that customer guide you — they’re using our competitors, they know what the weaknesses are and they know what the technology is capable of,” he said.

He added that the big request was to directly connect the advertiser’s performance data to TapHeaven’s algorithms, so the ad-buying is guided by an accurate measure of a customer’s value. More broadly, Hoyt said TapHeaven isn’t just “a black box” for advertisers, but instead allows them to add their own guidelines to the process.

“What we’ve built is the first self-service DSP with fully controllable automation,” he said. “The customer can actually take their marketing rules and processes, their KPIs, and build that through a sophisticated trigger system that automates their entire workflow but leaves them in full control.”

And while TapHeaven’s platform was built to meet the needs of a gaming advertiser, Hoyt argued that it should appeal to brand advertisers too, particularly because “everyone is going to become a performance marketer at some point.”