Adadyn wants to get small marketing teams who play around with Google AdSense to realize they can get similar results by doing programmatic themselves.
Adadyn released Monday a self-serve programmatic platform designed for businesses making less than $50 million annually. It’s the first major move for the Indian company since it rebranded from Ozone Media and focused on the US market.
“If you have a couple-person marketing team, programmatic has been out of reach: too expensive, too complex and not transparent enough,” said Adadyn COO Raj Beri.
EMarketer analyst Lauren Fisher sees programmatic adoption following a similar trajectory to search marketing, which started with large companies before being embraced by smaller ones. The same thing is now happening in the attribution space, and it makes sense for programmatic to follow.
“With programmatic, we’re at the point where adoption at among larger companies has been so high, the natural thing becomes to move it down to the smaller companies,” Fisher said.
Marketers who might have a $100-per-day budget or spend just $10,000 or $15,000 a year are considered a good fit for the platform. Beri, a veteran of multiple online travel companies, expects strong adoption in the travel and ecommerce verticals, where he said marketers are sophisticated enough to venture into programmatic and looking for alternatives to search.
Adadyn plans to win over marketers by offering a tool that performs as well as search. Many smaller marketers view display as a branding tool, Beri said. They think “display doesn’t convert, and do AdWords, email and some Facebook. But once you show them display converts like search, and there is dayparting, geotargeting and minimum bids, they’re surprised to learn that display can perform like traditional search.”
Plus, many of these smaller brands have been shut out from popular search marketing keywords, since they can’t bid as high as bigger brands.
Google Display Network (GDN) has long been used by smaller companies to gain access to display ads, but Beri said GDN is a black box compared to the transparency Adadyn provides. Some smaller marketers have also experimented with Criteo and AdRoll for retargeting, which he said also offer little transparency. Unlike them, Adadyn doesn’t arbitrage inventory, he added.
In addition to retargeting, Adadyn’s platform offers prospecting and dynamic creative optimization, a trio that’s not available in any of those platforms, Beri said.
Marketers will pay a fee on the media that flows through the platform, but don’t have to pay monthly fees if they only run twice a year, for example.
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Smaller, less sophisticated marketers often don’t have the resources or time to recognize and combat issues like fraud and viewability. Adadyn said it addresses those concerns with brand safety and anti-fraud vendors (including Forensiq) to make sure these smaller marketers purchase clean inventory.
That inventory comes from places like AppNexus and OpenX. Adadyn doesn’t have its own DSP technology, but works with others that provide the bidders. It focuses on giving marketers the clean user interface they need to DIY.
The self-serve product has been in the works for a year, and Beri thinks the time is right for marketers to start adopting this technology. “I think 2016 is going to be a turning point in self-serve programmatic. 2016 is going to be a hockey stick year in growth.”
Some clients are using the platform in beta mode, though Adadyn didn’t name any of its customers.
