As we’ve talked about in previous posts, AdHatchery offers two main benefits for our customers: 

1) Gives buyers an easy way to share information with sellers
2) Gives sellers an easy way to share information with buyers

It's a two way street of information flow. Early data shows that the first part of the system is working brilliantly, but we were a bit surprised about the data for the second. Let me explain…

We’re live with accounts across several agencies (Hill Holliday, Mediasmith and Black Bag Advertising). Each of the active accounts has created rich profiles about their brand responsibilities, target audiences, target publishers / content types, ROI goals and planning timelines. As sellers come into the system, they’re getting the information they need without taking the buyers’ time. Win win.

What we’re not seeing yet is sellers sending lots of ideas through AdHatchery. I spent time last week personally chatting with sellers and asking the question – why haven’t you sent a pitch yet? Are you going around the system to pitch the buyers directly? The answer, it turns out, was much simple than that. All the campaigns in the system begin the planning stage next month in April. I expected sellers to move quickly to submit ideas and get a leg up on competition, but early feedback is showing they’d prefer not to bother the buyers before planning starts. Fascinating. Again, buyers win. 

Based on this learning, we’ll be adding an alert feature to the system to remind sellers when a planning period is approaching. For all ideas submitted through AdHatchery, we’ll also send the seller an alert when the idea is viewed.

Today we’re also launching a cool feature for buyers on AdHatchery – they can grant sellers immediate access to a profile. Until now, they’ve been sending emails to sellers letting them know about Adhatchery. The text of the email said something like…

“We’re using a service called AdHatchery to help us share information with our publisher partners….Go there and you’ll find out information.”

Going forward, they can just click the “Add” button in their account profile. Check it out a screenshot below:

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

Yesterday I had a fascinating meeting with execs from one of the larger digital media agencies.  As I have more of these discussions, I’m seeing a pretty interesting pattern developing around the concept of “transparency.”  There are generally a variety of predictable twists / turns - we start with skepticism, head towards intrigue, reach a level of excitement, make another stop by doubt, and then end up at “Yeah, I’ll try that.”  

Skepticism: "You want me to be MORE transparent with sellers?? I can’t handle the current volume of sales calls – how do you expect me to handle more???"
Intrigue: “Oh, so I have a place to refer and filter incoming sales calls?”
Excitement: “Better ideas, less time commitment – and it’s free?”
Doubt: “Wait, but aren’t sellers going to hate this?”
Decision: “OK - makes sense.  Yeah, I’ll try that” 

The fascinating part of the discussion is that moment of Doubt before Decision.  Suddenly, transparency has become a friend rather than an enemy. Send sellers to a website where they can get informed and make a pitch – only spend time with people who impress you with good ideas.  Buyers see such a strong value proposition, they worry the other “side” is getting the short end of the stick.  “This is great for us, but sellers are going to hate this!”  Not true.

Sellers crave transparency.  No seller wants to spend 3 months trying to get a meeting with a buyer only to find they have no chance.  Sure, most sellers believe they could sell ice to eskimos, but they’re also practical.  Given the right information, they’ll focus all their energy / charisma on accounts they know are looking for their product. It turns out transparency is a friend to both sides. 

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

The State of California is getting a lot of attention this week for its challenge to constituents to help the state increase IT efficiency by 10x while spending 1/10 the budget.  They've set up a website to collect and filter ideas from regular people, and it’s powered by a startup called IdeaScale that bills itself as an “Idea Management” company. 

There are a couple of high-profile startups in this "Idea" space (see Spigit) that are showing great traction with the Fortune 500 and government clients.  The general idea behind these apps is that any large organization’s employees and customers represent an untapped gold mine of ideas.  Until now, extracting and filtering those ideas has been a mess.  The old “suggestion box” just doesn’t cut it, so technology companies are rushing in to help - providing a simple way for people to submit ideas, vote on ideas, and bubble the best to the top.

At its core, AdHatchery is also an Idea Management company.  We’re helping media agencies to extract and manage valuable ideas from a largely untapped gold mine of ideas – sellers.  It turns out there are thousands of sellers just chomping at the bit to give advertisers their best ideas. As an industry though, we're still caught in a "suggestion box" paradigm.  Information moves between buyers and sellers at a snails pace.  Information sharing between accounts at agencies is almost non-existent.  Buyers routinely move in and out of accounts, and their information resources move with them.  The people at agencies on the front lines of ideas simply don’t have tools to help them gather / filter information efficiently, while the amount of information available to them is growing exponentially. In the end, clients suffer.

AdHatchery is here to help.  Let me highlight a couple of features built for media buyers to manage ideas.  First, the “Star.”  When ideas are submitted through AdHatchery, buyers can choose to give it a Star and this becomes a primary sorting mechanism. 

Below, you see the basic header of a buyer’s Idea Dashboard on AdHatchery. All ideas that are ever submitted to an account through AdHatchery live in perpetuity on the dashboard.  Buyers can filter the dashboard by 1) ideas they’ve starred or 2) ideas their colleagues have starred.  They can also sort by account, seller company, seller rep or the date it was submitted. In the near future, we’ll allow them to sort / filter by publisher type, content type, ROI metric, etc.  If you’ve ever used Kayak’s search function, then you can imagine what we have in mind. 

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

For the past several months, the AdHatchery team has been working furiously to build our product.  Judging success and progress in the product development cycle is fairly binary.  The features you build either work or they don’t.  Simple as that.  As we move out of this initial development phase and into beta testing however, life gets a little more complicated.  The question is no longer so much whether features technically work (although that still keeps me up at night), but whether they are actually useful and easy to use.

Yesterday I spent the day chatting with other entrepreneurs and venture investors about the best way to run a beta test and gather input to continually improve the product.  Saar Gur from Charles River and Bob Geiman at Polaris were particularly insightful, but everyone I spoke with seemed to share the same three pieces of advice:

1) Pick beta testers that share your core vision
At this point, we have a number of agencies that have raised their hands to participate in the AdHatchery beta program.  Most of these agencies found their way to the AdHatchery website over the last month or so, saw only a log-in box, looked carefully for a tiny light-grey “Contact” link at the bottom of the page, sent me an email and asked to get involved.  This tells me these people are committed to solving a real pain point.  We hope that all of these early users will engage deeply with the system, provide rich feedback and put up with the inevitable bumps in the road because they share our vision and view of the world – that more openness and transparency can improve our industry. If you fit this profile and want to be a champion within your agency, please reach out to me at clay@adhatchery.com.

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

AdHatchery.com is officially live. We’ll be launching with a variety of agency partners over the next several weeks that will be testing the product and telling us what works / what doesn’t work. They’ll also be referring trusted sellers to the system, and we’re anxious to  hear their feedback as well. 

In earlier posts, I promised to give more detail about the AdHatchery product. I’ve posted a quick presentation below that I delivered to an audience of agency leaders at the iMedia Agency Summit in Scottsdale in December (huge thanks to Jim Nichols and John Durham at Catalyst:SF for the help there). The main theme re: inefficiencies in the current buyer/seller communication paradigm seemed to really resonate with the audience. In fact, several of the agencies we met at the conference will be participating in our beta.

Please note that any agency and seller names in this presentation are purely for example purposes. They are not current clients and are in no way affiliated with AdHatchery. That said, we hope to work with them soon!  Also, while we love Scribd for giving the world easy functionality for posting presentations, we've found their converter is not always perfect (as you'll see in the pres below).

AdHatchery pres for Angelvine.pptx Download this file

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

For a little context, I thought I'd give a quick overview of how AdHatchery got its start and the people involved.  In the spring of 2008, I was ending a three-year stint at a venture capital firm in Boston.  We had just funded two entrepreneurs to start a new ad network, and they graciously (or grudgingly, I’m not quite sure) offered me a sales role with the company.  On day 1, we set out to spread our gospel to anyone who would listen.  We called media buyers at every level, from junior planners to agency CEOs, from assistant brand managers to SVPs of Marketing.  Over the course of the next year, I met hundreds of overwhelmingly talented people in the digital media world.  I also made more cold calls than I ever care to remember.

Throughout all of my conversations with buyers and other sellers, it became clear that we all suffer from a similar problem.  While we all work in “digital” media, our daily routines are decidedly un-digital.  So, I decided to do something about it.  On April 10, 2009, I set out to create AdHatchery and we'll be live next week.  

- Clay Gran

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

At AdHatchery, our mission is simple: to make it easy for buyers and sellers of digital ads to connect.  While much of the hype in the digital ad world is around machine-driven buying, we know that great ad campaigns are conceived by real people.  Buyers and sellers sit down in agency conference rooms, munch on stale sandwiches, and hash out brilliant ideas for engaging customers online. This is the way that it's been done for years, and we'd bet that it'll continue this way for the foreseeable future.

The question is whether we can use technology to help improve human relationships in this industry.  Take Facebook as an example – they’ve helped all of us broaden and deepen our personal relationships with family and friends.  We can now passively stay in touch with more people, more often than ever before.  Ironically, by removing some of the “friction” of one-to-one communication, FB actually helped in many ways to improve our relationships.

AdHatchery has a similar goal for digital advertising.  We want to improve the offline relationship between buyers and sellers by facilitating more info sharing online.  The first release of AdHatchery will be live very soon, and we’ll dive more into product details in following posts.  In the meantime, thanks for visiting!

Permalink | Leave a comment  »