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.

Companies that join agree to allow their customers to share data. So much of ad tech these days is taking impression data or response rates and combining it with other data to better target ads or analyze how existing campaigns are doing. If an ad agency wants to start using MediaMath, they should be able to take all of their data from past campaign’s from Clickable and pour it into MediaMath’s engine, and vice versa.

Companies which choose to join the consortium are essentially removing barriers to entry and customer lock-in, but in return they are making it easier for customers to choose best-of-breed services. Google’s one-stop-shop might not be as appealing if it becomes easier to mix and match technologies from different ad startups in a simple way. Also, as the industry inevitably continues to consolidate, companies in the consortium will be one step ahead because in a sense they will be pre-integrated. But will it be enough to slow down the gorillas which just seem to keep gaining more and more market share?

Image by txkimmers

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.

The platform provides businesses with a summary of campaigns via a dashboard with key metrics, summary actions, and analysis of results and advice on potential improvements. SearchManager provides small businesses with analysis and recommendations on bids, budgeting, and on optimizing ad copy.

This is a pretty big deal for Clickable, which 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. American Express Open has millions of small business customers using its platform, and Clickable’s advertising platform should be a useful tool to any business wanting to maintain an advertising presence online. And white-labeling its powerful campaign platform could prove to be a significant revenue stream for the fledgling startup.

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.

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:

Clickable Pro now empowers you to create and upload pay-per-click Facebook ads in bulk. And with Clickable conversion tracking, you can track Facebook and search marketing revenues and conversions with a simple tag placed on your Web site. You can even produce customized, white-label reports with search and social performance displayed side by side.

Clickable is a Facebook partner which has integrated its service with the Facebook Ads API, which will allow Clickable customers to create, upload, and manage Facebook Ads directly from Clickable. The integration will work with pay-per-click text or image ads, but not yet with regular display ads.

Facebook ads are bringing in real revenues now for the social network. But how will they compare to search ads?

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.

Clickable Pro 2.0 also adds beta support for what it dubs Emerging Google Ad Formats, meaning less standard media placements like image ads (banners), local business (maps) and mobile (text and image) ads. In addition, the company has now added its Conversation Tracking feature, previously in beta, to the Clickable Pro interface in order to make it easier for advertisers and agencies to track and measure campaigns.

Management tools like Clickable come in handy for agencies managing search advertising budgets for multiple clients, as well as business owners who choose to advertise across different ad networks. These days, basically everyone should be looking to optimize their online advertising efforts to the maximum, and Clickable gives new customers a 15-day free trial to test the waters and see if their software suite helps generate more ROI. Pricing for Clickable Pro is set to 5% of the total monthly ad spend for campaigns exceeding a cost of $2,500, or a fixed $129 per month for those who manage to keep their cost under that amount.

Clickable is based out of New York and has raised a total of $20.5+ million in funding to date, most recently a $14.5 Series B round led by Founders Fund, Union Square Ventures, and FirstMark Capital.

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.

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.

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 widgets.

Nice idea, I’ll be keen to try it.

ZocDoc

ZocDoc is an online service that lets consumers find, search and book dentist and doctor appointments. Their service is integrated into dentists’ and doctors’ appointment systems so that last minute cancellations can be filled by other patients. ZocDoc also provides consumers with information on specific dentists’ and doctors’ office including what insurance they take.

Intro: there is a problem with easily finding doctors.

Online way to find and book medical practitioners. Site has just gone live now.

Nifty feature: site shows available time slots.

Play acting on stage, guy trips over, role playing using ZocDoc, something different.

Doctor listing include bio details + user ratings…I can feel a law suit coming on in the next 12-18months…but nice to get reviews of doctors from the user view point.

Experts panel and spotty Wifi. grrrr.

Guy likes Spottt…because it’s the only model he understands.

Esther Dyson likes Clickable, heart is with ZocDoc

Some good discussion around ZocDoc and lawyers, no live blogging as Wifi was down.

Experts seems to like ZocDoc, Clickable, Pubmatic. A strong session, I’d think Pubmatic just as the best product but only because I’ve got a publisher bias.