Shiny Ads President Roy Pereira got the idea to change the advertising industry in May 2009. "Some really small advertisers were coming into a friend's website, and unfortunately it was very different than the traditional media buy with a large brand advertiser and a large budget and a lot of understanding. These guys were coming in, they had $50 in their budget, they knew nothing about online advertising, they didn't have any ads designed and ready to go. And taking their ads was a losing proposition because it would cost you more to service them than the revenue they'd bring in. So I looked for a solution, and didn't find one. So I thought, well, we can build one."
He says that when he built his business plan that year, it dawned on him what a large opportunity he'd stumbled on in small advertisers. "Really every niche and news site has a good chance of converting their readers into advertisers -- everyone at a niche website is interested in that one topic, and so you have this great targeted audience. News is interesting because its mostly local or topical." Custom-made for small, "long-tail" advertisers, in other words.
Pereira launched his service, a fully automated self-serve ad platform that connects web publishers with smaller-scale advertisers, in January 2010. Since then they've attracted a lot of large websites, according to Pereira. The success led the company to move into a new, larger office space and to double the size of the team from two to four staff last month.
VP of Business Development and Sales Zunaid Khan, brought onboard to professionalize the sales end now that the technology has been demonstrated, chips in that even while the company continues to add to its offerings, the existing product is already serving up ads on smartphones and other platforms. "Essentially, whatever the customer is willing to sell, they can do it through our system."
He notes that the technology is turning heads in the industry: they were invited to present at the recent
Toronto DEMO event; they'll be presenting at Innovation Alley at the upcoming
ad:tech conference in San Francisco; and they were recently named by
IDC as one of the 10 hot tech companies in Toronto to watch.
Writer: Edward Keenan
Source: Roy Pereira and Zunaid Khan, Shiny Ads