Monday, April 4, 2011
Interview with Kirby Winfield, AdXpose
Today, Seattle-based Mpire announced it renamed itself AdXpose (www.adxpose.com), and gained a new funding round. To hear more about the company name change and funding, we spoke with Kirby Winfield, CEO of AdXpose:
First, for those not familiar with what you're doing now with AdXpose, what does your company do?
Kirby Winfield: We're an advertising analytics solution. What that means is our mission is to collect, structure, and make actionable digital advertising data. In a nutshell, we ride along with every ad impression in a client's campaign, whether that's in mobile video or display ad, and collect data about the effectiveness of that ad. That can be anything from what websites that ad is showing up on, the context around that ad, the placement and viewability of the ad, and also engagement that the user has for the creative itself and with the brand. We're also collecting information about the relative quality and safety of the content, as well as the audience characterizations such as geography. We think we're gathering just about every variable which impact the effectiveness of an ad, and we're capturing that data and making it actionable for ad agencies and ad networks.
Why the name change, and how is that related to the funding?
Kirby Winfield: We've made a big transition over the last two years. When I got to the company, it was running an advertising network. That ad network was leveraging the technology we are using today, to make sure the ads were placed in the right place at the right time, with the right audience. We made the decision a year and a half ago, as a team, to go back to the investors, and tell them--look, we think we can create more enterprise value by taking our technology, and using it to make other people's ads more effective, rather than using it as a platform for ourselves. This round is really an affirmation by the investors, that says that what we did what we said we were going to do a year and a half ago. We've now shut down that ad network, and started fresh in analytics. We took that to the market, got a ton of traction. The name change is to drop the association with our old business, start fresh, and top off our tanks, to make sure we can serve the demand we have today and move forward. It's a significant round, and one we are pretty excited about.
So it looks like you've honed your offerings and figured out that the analytics is a big market?
Kirby Winfield: We feel that we're the next generation measurement and metrics play, the big data play. There are not lots of people doing that in the online advertising space. There's a lot of data, but not lots of structure, and if you can take that information about that 27 billion advertising market, and distill it into code, that will allow people to buy and sell more efficiently. And, instead of just having that in one ad network, and being confined to that opportunity, we're saying that gives us now ability to access a total addressable market of 27 billion. That's certainly a much bigger opportunity.
Finally, with this new funding on hand, what's next on your plate?
Kirby Winfield: Really, two things. One, is because we're a software-as-a-service analytics solution, it's important for us to not only close new business, but also grow the business we've already closed. Lots of our growth comes from existing customers. We need technical folks who can get with our customers and help us leverage data to grow their ROI. For us, it's that customer facing piece and a very aggressive roadmap. We're always developing new ways of painting a digital picture of the value of advertising. We've also moved into mobile with a mobile web verification solution, and need to an app-based solution. I think we're in a window where we're doing something unique, and we can capitalize on its by developing new features and products.
Thanks!