Being an ad tech startup these days comes with a ton of hurdles. Over the past 10 years, startups in the ad tech space approached brands with delusions of grandeur, over promising and under delivering.

If you’re a new ad tech startup, this decade of often missed expectations, has created an environment where it is almost impossible to survive, especially if you’re company is bootstrapped. It’s not just that today’s ad tech companies are being held more accountable for marketing ROI, proof of concept to even get a meeting, and the requirement to exhibit an extremely unique and innovative idea. It’s that VP and directors at agencies and brands have become so overwhelmed and immune to these startups that getting meetings sometimes feels like winning Olympic gold.

To some degree, I cannot blame the agency or CMO. The barrier to entry to be in online advertising was, at one point, so low that almost anyone could serve an ad by turning on their computer and dedicate a server to push a lightweight image. People could then claim technological expertise and targeting efficiency because it is nearly impossible to discover your ad across the web. There was too much faith given by the marketer or agency to networks and digital technology startups because agencies and marketers are not traditionally technologists. This trust was often abused when advertising performance didn’t live up to the hype of the pitch.

The result is that marketers are becoming much more creative at finding potential partners.

Brands and agencies are forming partnerships through tech accelerator programs (boot camps for startups), creating innovation labs where they can mold technology at early stages, and launching pitch competitions where startups get a chance to present in front of marketers. For example, I observed a pitch competition that a brand held, where the startups had a month to put together a custom pitch to stand out. It was awesome… unique… different… solved a problem… everything you could want for a marketer. The next steps were to potentially work with that brand. Not a contract. Not a deal. All that heart soul, time, expectations, anticipation, long nights, pizza, working of the network, and well… “Great Job… you were in front of 15 C-Level Execs”.

In addition, marketers are putting these innovative technologies and businesses (startups) through much more rigorous sales cycles (some that last years just to get on a sales cycle), complete with custom presentations without follow ups (remember the expression “buying on yahoo won’t get you fired.”?), and requests for free labor and work to build a proof of concept specific to that company.

While this is all great and helpful for vetting, the result for marketers is that they are not striking while the iron is hot. These methods simply are not scalable. This is also unfortunate because it could impede the next Google or Facebook from happening (I am pretty sure that Facebook and Google didn’t go through pitch competitions), and also because the role of a marketer is to experiment, test things out, and find unique ways to capture an audience’s attention. Testing these new businesses and technologies does not mean that you have to have a hunch that it will work out. Startups these days are tied to strict expectations on ROI and proof through analytics… more than ever before.

Here are some ways that marketers can better work with today’s start-ups:

Help direct and mature startups as they have a lot to learn and well… you won’t have to deal with bad best practices that drive you nuts today.
Invest in these startups: use your marketing dollars to invest and create the future. Asking for gratis work only hurts the company and will potentially put them out of business (which doesn’t do anyone justice when the solution works).
Please stop saying “we are all planned out for the year, but thanks for the time.” If things don’t work as planned (pun intended), have a partners in place to complete your goals.
Today’s crop of ad tech companies are different and better than those of the past. For one, data has had a large impact on the advertising industry. We have the ability to measure ad campaigns in so many different ways that it requires us to be accountable and transparent. The startup community is bigger than ever and marketers have the ability to use this to their advantage in a positive way that can build their future as well. This isn’t the time to exploit the labor, the findings, and the innovation of companies; it is the time to reinforce change and ride the wave so that everyone wins.

The post Is Ad Tech Being Haunted by the Ghosts of Ad Tech Past? appeared first on Klick Push.

I recently read the book Crossing the Chasm (3rd Edition) by Geoffry A. Moore, and he defines these hurdles as chasms, which has a more impactful denotation. During the journey of building a business it is up to the executive team to spot these chasms, embrace the struggle, and maneuver through them. Unfortunately, most people can’t spot the chasm unless they’ve seen them before, e.g. have experienced successful AND failed ventures (failure allows you to acknowledge that it isn’t luck that pushes you over the chasm).

During countless conversations with managers, venture capitalists and fellow entrepreneurs I’ve noticed that often, even smart people, fail to identify these rudimentary rights of passage.

While most people might see a chasm as a dead end with no way to cross, or fail to see them all together; the opportunistic entrepreneur will leverage a chasm as the turning point to take their business from good to great.

At Klick Push we believe the best way to cross our early chasms are by building lasting relationships with investors, advisors, customers, and partners. This ensures you and your team have the stamina to plow through the abyss while keeping the relationships that matter most to an early stage company.

Communication has allowed us to become a team that constantly absorbs feedback to make a better product for our customers and better serve their needs. Hopefully, we can repurpose that transparency here, and our journey can help awaken some of the struggles you are having in your office, company, or life.

Below, I’ll walk you through the 5 stages of our company and how we approached each major milestone. But first, let me give you a brief introduction to Klick Push: we are an ad technology platform that makes it easy for marketers to place digital media (music) inside display advertising to help drive direct response, build communities, and increase ROI. We allow any marketer to associate themselves with artists from Elvis, AC/DC, Kings of Leon, Beyonce, Justin Timberlake, Frank Sinatra, to Shakira.

Click this sentence for a brief overview on how we can improve your advertising in under 5 minutes

1. Inception In order to validate our ideas, we had to get enthusiasts to believe in our vision and help us make it a reality. We looked at problems in the industry, breaking points, and ways to disrupt and innovate the market.

Ways we got enthusiasts on board:

Emphasized our industry expertise and background
Developed a narrative on how it will benefit the enthusiast’s life (career, hobbies, passions etc.)
Showed something different and unique
Built relationships (these are the people that are going to help you off the ground)

2. Post Tech Enthusiasts Adoption: The vision was accepted (and long days (years?) spent finding these people) and we successfully brought on partners like Reverb Nation, Sony Entertainment, The Orchard, to supply us content to fulfill our vision of building new distribution channels for media (music) and how media would drive engagement in advertising. Additionally we integrated products into apps and games to help us distribute music into live environments, build data sets, and develop a prototype.

Then we brought on advertisers like Live Nation, Subway, Ford, etc to help provide case studies to get us up and running. By the end of our first 8 months of pushing our relationships into production, we had several different products and over 30 million data points.

How we developed our relationships:

We were humble (and still are), honest, and real (don’t act like a big shot)
Gave our customers something free (they are putting their neck out there for you)
Made major efforts to accommodate the relationship- move to NYC, schedule in person meets, custom creative proposals, and sent them thank you notes and kind gestures.
ASK! Asked for help, references, and let them get involved with the company

3. The Chasm after 8 months of live data, we spent time reviewing and analyzing our various products — we had to pick a path! This was the Chasm. Klick Push’s prototype had presented music in apps and games, to over 2 million people and had delivered about 1 million free songs (that is a 50% conversion on a product!). We also ran a handful of ad campaigns that did EXTREMELY well for clients like Ford and Live Nation. There was a lot brewing and we needed to focus on one solution, productize that, and scale tech and sales to a broader market (pragmatists).

How we decided which product to focus on and be dedicated:

Evaluated the integration cycle for our various products (is it going to take 5 minutes, 5 days, or 5 months to get integrated with a partner?)
Questioned revenue channels and consumer usage (for a b to b company we needed to focus on where the revenue would come from and how easy it would be to scale it)
Asked if there was significant market for this product (even if it is innovative, is there common sense that this would be adopted)
Reflected on whether we there was a compelling narrative around the product
Most Importantly we asked ourselves, “Are we excited about it and would we consume this?

4. Crossing the Chasm: Deciding on a product and strategy meant narrowing our focus to building a solution that could easily be digested by customers and easy for them to integrate. This included tightening the sales pitch and building out target customers while asking for TONS of help. Sounds obvious, but when you have a lot of good things going on, you have to weigh the pro’s and cons — verrrrry carefully. As a team, we all needed to be excited about this and feel that there was a future and genuine intention behind what we were doing.

How we approached the chasm

Sales, Sales, Sales, Sales, Sales….SALES (we started building strategies and lead lists on people we needed to talk to)
Marketing, marketing, marketing, marketing….MARKETING (communicate with your customers, build landing pages that explain your product and drive people to interact with your product without you having to be on a call — This is what we did: http://prod1.klickpush.com/pages/ads-that-work)
Decided to build a user friendly interface product and platform for our customers (I had my mom create an ad on the Klick Push platform. She doesn’t work in advertising)
We mindfully approached the process and acknowledged past learnings and made them applicable to today.

5. Gut. At the end of the day, we had to trust our gut and where the business needed to go. Our investors and advisors trusted us and brought a lot of encouragement to our decisions. We did what felt right — we went on a metaphorical diet and trimmed the fat off the company by honing in our product offering and making it easy for our customers to understand.

As we approached the chasm, we listened to what our customers wanted and what the market demanded. You will have (or maybe you already have had) the same experiences. Whether it’s trying to “listen” to another person as a relationship grows, or knocking on the doors of your ideal clients in order to understand their needs and thus understanding how your offering can fill their void, take this time to reflect, focus, and be aware and mindful to see where you are going and how you are doing it.

Remember, part of disrupting and innovating is making sure your are disrupting an industry that needs/wants to be disrupted and innovating in a way that customers want/need to be innovated.

Ben Jorgensen — CEO, Klick Push, Inc.

www.klickpush.com

Ben@klickpush.com

The post Can You Spot the Chasm? How we cross chasms that lead to growth appeared first on Klick Push.