How Brett Brewer Revolutionized Advertising

How Brett Brewer Revolutionized Advertising Brett: Our main purpose to help small and medium sized businesses reach consumers outside of the Yahoo and Google. Zorianna: Hi and welcome to Dog & Pony, I'm Zorianna Kit. Brett Brewer is the president of Adknowledge and a leader in behavioral marketing. Brett Welcome. Brett: Thank you. Zorianna: So tell me about all this behavioral marketing. What does that mean? Brett: It's the concept around trying to show the most relevant add to an individual user at that moment. Zorianna: So whatever they're looking at you want to show an ad that would sort of somehow compare or be similar to what they're looking at? Brett: Yes, so that's actually typically referred to as contextual targeting. The two basic buckets of online advertising are contextual targeting which is on a gardening site you see a gardening ad and on a finance site you see a finance ad. Zorianna: Makes sense. Brett: Behavior well actually depends on the individual user that's on that page. Based on the behaviors of that actual user and depending on what ads they've clicked on and what ads they haven't clicked on, they're shown ads that the person you know we hope would be interested in. Zorianna: So who's the big brother that's watching me as I do all this because that's like a little creepy? Brett: None of it is personally identifiable information, it's really just based on that individual computer and the ads that computer has clicked on and hasn't clicked on. Zorianna: So then your company Adknowledge what does it do exactly in this world? Brett: Our main purpose is to help small and medium sized businesses reach consumers outside of Yahoo and Google. They're the two biggest search engines, so typically for small and medium sized businesses it's easy to advertise in the search channel because you just have to go to Yahoo and Google, go into the bid system, pick the keywords that are relevant for your ads or your products, set your bids and then the process starts. As a small business to get your ads onto CNN.com or onto myspace or onto opera.com. Zorianna: The low guys will never be seen on, on those big search engines. Brett: Exactly. In 2003-2004 you typically would see 4, 500,000 advertisers in Yahoo and Google because it's very easy, simple to use system. Zorianna: But it's saturated, I mean that's. Brett: Exactly, it's very competitive. So advertisers are pretty much bid up to the point where they're at a breakeven, yet you've got the whole internet at large, so every, every webpage you can think of and all that inventory. So Adknowledge founded in, in January 2004 set out to resolve that issue and make it easy for the small and medium sized search engine advertiser to get their ads out. Zorianna: Is there special technology behind this business? Brett: Yes, so that's the behavioral targeting technology that we talked about earlier, but the way it actually works from an advertiser side is much simpler. They go into a central bid system, they see one of 1200 categories for which Lasik eye surgery might be one, fly fishing might be one really everything you could possibly think of, the advertiser then picks the category that's right for their products. There's a preexisting creative that exists in that, in that category. So it's woman's face and she's smiling and it says see better starting today, have Lasik eye surgery. If the advertiser is then bidding to be one of two text advertisers that are placed inside that graphical creative when we show that graphical creative on cnn.com or opera.com. Zorianna: So why do you care so much about the little guy? Brett: It's really the small and medium sized businesses where the system breaks down because of the reasons I said, they just can't financially make it make sense to get their ads out across the internet. Zorianna: And then you help them and then they become big and they don't need you anymore. Brett: Right, even as an advertiser becomes big and may be even hires and internal graphic artist and immediate buyer they will always still use Adknowledge because they're really spending money where they're making money, so they're really bidding a dollar on a click because they're able to make a $1.20. Zorianna: Now speaking of money, how does your company make money off of all of this? Brett: So we're paid 100% by the advertisers. So all the advertisers are bidding typically on a cost per click basis and paying on a credit card just like they would at Yahoo and Google and they're billed when they receive those clicks. Zorianna: Obviously you've had other jobs before this. How have those past ventures helped you in your current position? Brett: My last business was called Intermix Media. Zorianna: Huge company. Brett: Yeah it was a big company. We started out actually in e-commerce, so selling movies and music and games online back in 1998 and 1999. We migrated the business and got out of that and started launching contents like short animation, greeting cards, casual game sites and then eventually in, in the summer of 2003 launched myspace which became bigger than anything we'd ever done before. Zorianna: And you were part of that launch? Brett: Correct, yeah and, and that myspace got very large, Intermix in general got very large and, and we sold that business to News Corp in 2005. Zorianna: Do you guys regret doing that now? Brett: Back in 2003-2004 it was, it was much more of an unknown landscape in the social networking category, so we had attorney generals from all of the country that were trying to figure out how the stalker issues we're going to work and, and all that and as a small company that stuff is just frankly harder to deal with than a big entity like News Corp. Zorianna: So you still reaping the financial rewards from selling it? Brett: We sold the business for roughly $670 million. So as a smaller company we had a, we had a hard time selling big brands into myspace, into a social networking platform where News Corp, the big advantage is they've obviously a huge branded sales team that already has relationships with Coke and Mountain Dew and SONY pictures and therefore can leverage those from the television side into myspace and that's a lot of what's fueled the growth. Zorianna: So do you regret the sale or not? I know I asked you that previously and there was a, an answer like a yes or no. Brett: Oh, yeah, I don't, I don't. Zorianna: You don't. Brett: The nice thing about selling the business to News Corp was I got to spend a lot of time with Rupert Murdoch and despite you know what some people say about him, he's a fantastic person and incredibly intelligent. So I really have a lot of respect for him and, and enjoyed getting to spend time with that kind of a thinker. Zorianna: Brett Brewers, president of Adknowledge, thank you so much for joining us. Brett: Thank you. Zorianna: If you have questions, comments or ideas for guest, please email us at info@dogandpony.com. I am Zorianna Kit. Thanks for watching.