Innovation vs. Execution
Today, I read that Yahoo! is working on “Apex”, a new digital ad platform that will bring ad choices together for advertisers—and have a one-stop-shop feel to it.
Great idea!
We’ve actually been on this concept for a couple of years now—but from the other side—and are about to release the most outstanding converged ad platform for publishers to date. It’s been a long-time coming, but the reason why it’s taken us longer is…
Execution. It has to be easy and simple for publishers. Otherwise
there will be no ads to display.
Clearly, Greenlight doesn’t have a problem with innovation. If you look at our history, we have a ton of “firsts”, awards, patents, etc. Not bad for a small company! Luckily, we’ve always been able to execute as well. We have operators, search engines, and large publishers using our tools—not to mention the legions of end-users from around the world.
On the other hand, other mobile content providers—and more specifically, mobile advertising companies—have had a lot more difficulty with execution. Look at Motricity: even having raised a lot of money doesn’t make you immune to execution. Indeed there are companies that get talked about quite a bit: AdMob launched a run-of-site mobile ad platform, Ingenio has lead click-to-call, and a handful of others are doing mobile banner ads. But the rest—and even the so-called “players”—are having difficulty being profitable and meaningful. I can’t tell you how many people contact us each day going, “Hey, we tried [insert mobile ad company here]. And they were horrible. Can you help us?”
Ironically, there’s a lot of hype around mobile advertising right now given the reality. But from what I can tell, there hasn’t been a program implemented yet that is concretely innovative—and executed—in this space. As Mark Simon states in his post about this…
As marketers, we’re faced everyday with choices that give us “innovative” ways to reach new audiences online. Hundreds of novel interactive companies call us up with new schemes to exploit emergent media, from social networking to viral to behavioral. But unless these “innovative” schemes make our lives (or our clients’ lives) easier, they’re not worth thinking about. What good is an innovative technology that fails to deliver the scale required for an effective interactive campaign? How much complexity is required to execute it?
Well said. This is the kind of opportunity we’re looking forward to capitalize on.
Posted by Kevin Perkins