TechPulse 360

For Collective Media CEO Joe Apprendi, the targeted ad market is experiencing hyper-growth

If you ask Collective Media CEO Joe Apprendi, the online ad market is healthy and growing; even convincing venture capital firm Accel Partners to invest $20 million in a second round of funding.

For Apprendi, the online ad market will do so well in 2009 that he expects budgets flowing to online ad networks leveraging contextual, behavioral and demographic targeting to grow 60 percent or more.

Apprendi also told me in a phone conversation that Collective Network has been profitable for the last 2 year and a half with a revenue run rate of $100 million. The company’s revenue grew 210 percent last year and again 65 percent in the first quarter of 2009, compare to the year before.

Not an easy thing to do in this down environment.

The 100-people New York startup also claims to be the 16th largest ad network in the U.S. focusing exclusively on on unsold or unreserved premium ad space (or “remnant”) and competing with Specific Media as well as the big four ad networks: AOL, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo.

Here’s an excerpt of my conversation with Apprendi:

So what’s all the fuss about the downfall of online advertising?

Apprendi: The reason why we are growing fast in a rather flat U.S. display media business is because there is more ad dollars flowing to ad networks leveraging contextual, behavioral and demographic targeting, and less to specific sites with premium CPMs, which is dropping.

What about advertising budgets?

Worst case scenario, the advertisers’ display budget is flat year over year, and they are spending more in this audience centric way which offers marketers better efficiency and targeting. I think the slower ad economy has accelerated the shift away from premium sites towards more behavioral targeting.

Why would a brand or an advertiser use Collective Media for its marketing campaign rather than its competitors?

First and foremost is our eco-system of publishers: 100% comscore 500, brand name, reputable publishers, the Tier-1 marketplace for inventory. Which is very different from Google or Yahoo for that matter, which is more long tail beyond their own and operated inventory.
Two, our targeting. Our behavioral and contextual targeting is heads above the competition in terms of its reliability and accuracy.

And then lastly, our analytics. Advertisers get a lot greater insight on what audience segments are performing vs others based on a variety of performance metrics, above and beyond just impressions and clicks, which are not available with other ad networks, let alone Google, Yahoo and Microsoft.

Google?

We work with Google in a number of different way. Our underlying ad technology is DART from DoubleClick, on which we built our AMP ad platform. And then we also work with them on their ad inventory exchange, as a component of our overall eco-system. There are good partner and technology provider, but also we compete with them for media spend.