As the online ad technology industry consolidates, it is becoming tougher for startups to stand out among the giants. The 500-pound gorillas like Google and Microsoft keep integrating in new technologies and selling themselves as a one-stop shop to ad agencies, publishers, and brand marketers. But a group of ad tech startups is in the process of creating a counterweight to all the consolidation by establishing a consortium for sharing data and agreeing on standard ways to interoperate.
Details are still spare on the yet-to-be announced group, but here is what I’ve been able to find out from industry sources. It will be called the Consortium for Accountable Advertising. The four founding members are Cross Commerce Media (Stephen and Heidi Messer’s ad startup) , Clickable, MediaMath, and TARGUSinfo. They are actively recruiting other ad tech companies to join the consortium. → Read More
Clickable, the ad management platform that lets search marketers measure and track the performance of their online marketing campaigns across different search engines and advertising networks, is partnering with American Express OPEN to launch SearchManager, a product that allows small business owners to streamline search advertising and marketing.
American Express is essentially white-labeling Clickable’s platform for its millions of OPEN business customer via SearchManager. SearchManager is a self-managed solution for small business marketers who are currently doing search advertising, but are looking for a simple and more efficient bid management experience via a centralized dashboard. SearchManager provides an unified access platform to advertise via Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing, Microsoft AdCenter and even Facebook Ads. SearchManager allows business owners to manage their campaigns with one interface. → Read More
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. → Read More
It will soon be possible to compare the performance of search and social ad campaigns side by side. Clickable, the ad management platform that lets search marketers measure and track the performance of their online marketing campaigns across different search engines and advertising networks, will be adding Facebook Ads as an option on April 12.
What that means is that an advertiser buying pay-per-click ads on Google can test the performance of those search ads against pay-per-click ads on Facebook targeted to particular social demographics. Search ads versus social ads, all in one dashboard. According to this sign-up page on Clickable: → Read More
Clickable is debuting version 2.0 of its search advertising management suite today, adding to the software a slew of features that should make it easier for small and medium-sized businesses to stay on top of online marketing campaigns held across a variety of advertising networks such as Google, Yahoo and MSN.
While it was already possible for Clickable users to import different accounts in order to manage their campaigns from an interface designed to make them more intuitive and effective, Clickable Pro 2.0 now enables them to consolidate management of multiple search advertising campaigns across advertising networks from one central location. To achieve this, Clickable has added features like bulk editing and filtering of keywords which allow agencies and advertisers to rapidly search, edit and export high volumes of keywords across all advertising networks and accounts, as well as a recommendation engine that should allow advertisers to make search campaigns more effective. → Read More
Clickable, the web advertising management company that launched at TechCrunch40, has closed a $14.5 Million Series B round led by Founders Fund, Union Square Ventures, and FirstMark Capital. The round brings Clickable’s total funding to $22.5 million, and comes only eight months after the company completed its $6 million two-part Series A round. Clickable offers users a web-based dashboard that allows them to manage their advertising campaigns across a number of websites. The site also offers a tutorial section called “Clickable University” where users can see how to more effective use and analyze their ads. The large sums of money will be used to “accelerate Clickable’s momentum”, likely by attempting to increase exposure with a marketing push and adding to the company’s workforce. CrunchBase Information Clickable Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Advertising technology startup Clickable has raised another $3 million from its lead investors Union Square Ventures and Pequot Ventures, in a follow-on round to the $3 million it raised last July, confirms CEO David Kidder. He is calling it an A-1 round. Former CEO Jonathan Miller has also joined Clickable’s board, a fact we reported back in September during TechCrunch40, where Clickable launched. Velocity Investment Group, the tech buyout fund Miller recently started with Ross Levinsohn, is not an investor in Clickable. The startup is developing Web-based ad campaign management tools. Update: Peter Thiel and Jonathan Miller are understood to have participated personally in the round as well. CrunchBase Information Clickable Union Square Ventures FirstMark Capital Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Session six as follows, including our live notes. Spottt (Adbrite) Spottt helps like-minded sites promote each other for free. Just put a Spottt on your site, blog, or MySpace profile. Every time you show someone else’s ad, they’ll show yours. Spottt was created by AdBrite, with the assistance of Tony Hsieh, co-founder of LinkExchange. Simple model, 1:1 exchange model. Same as original link exchange program bought by Microsoft. More useful than original program. Original co-founder of LinkExchange.com on board Clickable Clickable provides a service for creating and managing online advertising. Their technology provides campaign management tools and an intuitive interface to view and manage performance and direct spending across all major ad networks. In addition, advertisers are empowered to self-manage their ad buying to yield transformational results. TC40 anouncements: Ex AOL CEO has join board, adding Adbrite on site, and released in beta. advertising aggregation tool, slick interface. Manage campaigns on Yahoo, Adwords. GotStatus GotStatus is a community-driven systems management and monitoring tool that is aiming to become “Google Analytics for servers.” Users are able to place a snippet of javascript and start managing and monitoring the server side of their web applications in the same way Google Analytics does for their browser side. They will be able to track metrics on items like new accounts per day, database size, and Amazon S3 usage. Intro is a comparison to Google Analytics, but states that Google only solves half the problem, no coverage of the server. Another nice interface, provides server stats including email. Multi-user platfrom, supports customers/ clients. Can customize results with dashboards, widgets. “User Generated Monitoring” PubMatic PubMatic is a meta ad server that sits between online publishers and online ad networks like Google AdSense, Yahoo Publisher Network and Value Click. Their service helps small- and medium-sized publishers manage and maximize their advertising inventory by seamlessly communicating with multiple ad networks to help them find the optimal ad layout and the highest paying ad network. They also provide them with a central dashboard to track all their ad networks and ad configurations. Pitch: we’re the first company presenting at TC40 that offers revenue opportunities for publishers. Pubmatic works as the middle man. Offers optimization tools as well, color choices, sizes. In alpha testing until today, now in open beta Sites using the service have seen 70-110% increase in revenue. Data is pulled from other ad networks. Also offers dashboard → Read More
