A lot has changed since we first started cutting our teeth in this industry back in 2007. In Internet years, we’re pretty old. In fact, we’re so old, that when we launched BuySellAds, the Programmatic practices of today weren’t even really a thing yet.
In 2007 we set out to fix a problem that we saw in the online advertising market: the inefficient processes of media buying and selling. We believed we could be a catalyst for change. By offering a streamlined, efficient, and transparent system, we could change not only how publishers and advertisers interacted, but also how each group engaged with the process as a whole. The industry desperately needed it.
Fast-forward to today, a full eight years into the future, and the market, which wasn’t ready for change back when we started, has scaled significantly. Larger publishers are beginning to understand the value of the tools that we originally developed for small and medium-sized publishers. They’re ready to adopt automation for their direct sales processes that will inevitably result in access to amazing marketing opportunities for advertisers, as well as increased advertising revenue and decreased costs for publishers.
Time is life’s most valuable resource. When an advertiser or a publisher uses our tools that is what they receive in exchange. This is why we’re excited to officially announce these two new additions to the BuySellAds Automated Guaranteed product suite: Self-Serve Direct and Deal Manager Direct.
Self-Serve Direct
Self-Serve Direct is a white-labelled tool for automating the process of selling direct to sub-$20,000 advertisers. It’s built to expand the top of the sales funnel for premium publishers by helping them capture advertisers directly on-site for both display and native ad units.
Large publishers are using Self-Serve Direct to capture more revenue without losing time hand-holding advertisers through the process or clogging up the ad ops queue. Large publishers are using Self-Serve Direct as their primary method for advertisers to buy media from them, while they act as sales consultants alongside the self-serve platform.
We believe one of ad tech’s greatest challenges is to clearly present the world of possibility to advertisers. Doing this, and exposing access to all of the web’s most valuable ad inventory is no easy task. Self-Serve Direct is the first step towards this goal.
Deal Manager Direct
Our second big announcement is the launch of Deal Manager Direct. This new service is designed to build and send proposals to advertisers, as well as organizing entire ad campaigns. We originally built this product for our own internal sales team, and it’s made them better at their jobs. Within the first two months of beta testing this tool with our customers, they have managed to send out over $1,000,000 in proposals, and the return has resulted in over $700,000 in deals already signed.
Our mission is to make the world’s digital advertising inventory easy to buy, and even easier to sell. With a company name like BuySellAds, anything short of that goal is unacceptable. Deal Manager Direct takes us one step closer to reaching our mission.
The early feedback on this product is clear: more deals are getting signed, and they’re getting signed even quicker than in the past.
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With both of these new offerings, we hope to empower publishers and streamline the sales process further than we already have to date. We set out in 2007 to eliminate the cruft in the online advertising world, and today we’re taking another swing at refining the advertising sales process with both Self-Serve Direct and Deal Manager Direct. We think it’s going to change the way you think about your advertiser funnel.
We’re also very excited to announce that many large advertisers and publishers have been taking advantage of our new products for months. Folks like The Atlantic, Newsweek, NPR, Purch, Stack Exchange, BitTorrent, and many more are reaping the efficiency and revenue lift of BuySellAds-powered direct sales automation.
The future is bright.
In fact, the future is so bright that eMarketer is projecting a rapid shift toward automation for direct sales (referred to as Automated Guaranteed within the industry), expecting that it will account for 42% of Programmatic by 2016, or $8.57 billion.
Exciting times are ahead, and we’re glad to be at the forefront of the conversation.
But that’s not all. We’re currently working with a small group of customers on an implementation of Self-Serve Direct as a bidding platform as well. Last year we acquired pay-per-click bidding technology LaunchBit. While buying and selling ads on a guaranteed basis is at our core, it’s not the complete picture when it comes to direct sales between an advertiser and publisher. We look forward to showing you more of what we’ve been up to in the months ahead.