Saverin-backed ADZ aims to reshape advertising industry

Nestled within the F11 incubator space at the gleaming Fusionopolis building, engineers from advertising solutions company ADZ are hard at work refining a product which they hope could change the way advertising campaigns are run.

Walking past the spacey office shared between a few technology startups, we ventured into a meeting room, where ADZ founder/CEO Reza Behnam and systems technologist Thomas Gorissen are sitting. Taking time out of their busy schedules, they explained to SGE how their product works.

“Imagine iTunes, where buyers can search for the music they want and buy it. We’re doing something similar for the advertising industry, where we’re aggregating advertising impressions and allowing buyers to buy from a variety of publishers’ ad inventory,” says Reza.

Here’s what ADZ proposes to do: It is an online, global marketplace where advertisers bid for ad space from publishers. It offers a mixture of proprietary and available best-of-breed tools that help advertisers optimize, analyze, and run their marketing campaigns. On the other side of the ecosystem, publishers can monetize their inventory of ad space and the knowledge of their consumers.

Last but not least, ADZ is an online platform that strives to present these complicated technologies in an easy-to-understand and user-friendly interface for both advertisers and publishers.

In plain speak, ADZ allows, for example, a Singapore Airlines marketing executive to buy ad space in The New York Times and conduct an online advertising campaign from the comfort of an office chair, using a collection of tightly integrated, online software.

In advertising parlance, ADZ combines a variety of ad networks, ad exchanges, and supply-side platforms into one comprehensive, end-to-end product.

Sounds ambitious? It is. The idea came to Reza while he was working at Yahoo! in 2006. He saw how marketers struggled with online advertising, complaining that it’s too complex and difficult to execute.

Furthermore, online advertising is a lucrative gold mine that has not translated into a gold rush. While people spend massive amounts of time online, advertising agencies are not allocating an equally ambitious online marketing expenditure.

“Part of the blame lies with advertising and publishing industries as we have not made display advertising easy enough to execute and buy,” he says. “The search players have done a better job in standardizing the approach to buy search.”

No wonder advertisers are scared of going online. Image: LUMA Partners

He observed that there was room for infrastructural innovations that could make online advertising easier. Also, Asia (excluding Japan), with a much less developed and complex online advertising ecosystem as compared to the United States, was a prime place for such a product to mushroom.