Transforming The Local Online Advertising Industry

I’d like to share with you some exciting news from our advertising technology startup, Clickable!

Context: Since I joined the management team in 2007, we launched the first self-manage tool to make search advertising simple for small and midsize businesses, a segment that comprises half of total online advertising spend. Our team, now over 80 colleagues, has rapidly innovated with our customers!

So what’s the new? Building on our core technology, we’re delighted to announce today a white-label advertising solution for large companies that service many small and local-business customers. We’ve named it Clickable Platform, and it enables enterprises to deploy large-scale online advertising and lead-generation programs under their own trusted brands. We’ve integrated all the elegant components of Clickable into a system that lets our partners serve a full continuum of local advertisers – from beginners to professionals, including those with very small to very large investments.

Why did we expand our business? According to Kelsey Group, the interactive share of local ad spending will more than double from 9 percent in 2008 to 22.2 percent in 2013, while traditional segments will decrease from $141.3 billion in 2008 to $112.4 billion. That’s a major market opportunity! But so far the local interactive advertising industry has struggled to scale and deliver customer value, resulting in annual customer churn rates between 60 and 90 percent. We believe our technology solves these problems by redefining the economics. We simply enable large-companies that manage online advertising to do so much more efficiently and at greater scale, while delivering greater performance to local businesses. Among our first customers to leverage Clickable Platform are LexisNexis and Franchise Company Solutions. We’re excited to be activating Clickable Platform with some major Fortune 500 partners later this year.

Here’s David Kidder’s blog post on Clickable Platform, here’s local advertising analyst Greg Sterling’s take, and here’s Kelsey Group’s Peter Krasilovsky’s take.

This is an area of the advertising business that is ripe for disruption, but receives relatively little attention. This  product launch has commanded a lot of my time and  intellect, so it’s rewarding to finally see it seeded in the market.