Lyle Wagner on Connected Interactive's advertising technology

0:20likewise let's learn a little bit about connected interactive today I know you guys have spearheaded the digital advertising industry quite well so far but let for our viewers could you give the vision and the purpose of connected interactive sure yeah our vision is simple we're a data-driven marketing technology company focused on delivering the best performance for our clients and

0:43in the best user experience and for our publishers whether you are a small gaming app or an automotive brand so this means we like to dive deep into analytics to be you know the best strategies and tools to ensure advertiser ads get shown to people who are actually interested it's hard it's hard work for sure and most medium to large size companies that think about

1:07digital advertising always go straight to Facebook and Google Analytics and Google AdWords so I'm sure as you are well familiar with the industry you probably know this but what are they missing out on by just using Facebook and Google to grow their client base and why should they be using connective interactive as well yeah so Facebook and Google are great I mean

1:30they're the great self-serve tools and that's why they have such high adoption and they do work very well but what clients are missing out on is probably around 50% of the advertising market it's actually not on Facebook and Google they're you know there's thousands millions of websites and apps out there and not all of them are covered by those

1:54players Facebook is its own ecosystem and Google does not necessarily advertise everyone right so that's you know that's that's a major factor another one is that they're actually walled gardens and that a lot of people realize that and when I say walled garden I mean that they're closed eCos and clients and publishers who work with them the marketing data and the user

2:23data that they pass to those platforms they actually it doesn't belong to them it actually belongs to those those partners Google in Facebook so it's it's a closed ecosystem so what we can offer them is more transparency and openness with their marketing data and just with the you know the approach that we offer that's great to hear Lyle and

2:49that seems to be the common trend that everyone is saying now is the cost of Google and the cost of free products it's almost like the end users have been turned into a product and Google and Facebook own all of that analytics data that really the people who are the main companies that are using these services should own their be able to own

3:12their own data so it's pretty crazy and the end users seem to be bombarded with tons of different advertisements now and the click rate seems pretty low and many people have said that because of this the advertising industry is broken do you believe that the industry is broken right now for regular ads or is it working just fine I don't think it's broken and I think it can be improved of

3:37course and what you what you referring to it is google showing ads to people in exchange for using Gmail and I think that the principles of that actually make a lot of sense because what they're doing is they're they're mining the data and then using that to figure out what ads to show to you and on in the on principle it's it's a good idea because users generally want to see ads that are

4:06relevant to them and not just any random ad that doesn't they're not interested in right but what they don't want necessarily it's just and dated by ads all the time and to receive you know maybe they don't feel like they're getting anything exchanged for them and what we've found actually that when we first started connected interactive we actually focused on

4:32gaming industry on free-to-play games and showing ads to gamers and what we would do is give them credits for watching my rat so with these credits they could use the credits in the game to advance beginning experiments like buy a better gun or a level or get more energy and what we found is actually click raised from from that model of opportunity

4:59we're significantly higher than our regular advertising that we were doing where we weren't really giving the user side so I think that shows that you know if you do offer people more they're more receptive to advertise it's really interesting that you mention that and what comes to mind in the blockchain industry right now is become a very

5:23popular web browser called brave which was actually created by the founders of Firefox but in brave they have a brave rewards where you actually get paid to look at the ads and if you if you don't want to get paid then the ads can be turned off do you foresee the industry moving to this where everything is reward based and whether you're earning some free tokens in a game or you're

5:46earning some cryptocurrency or some kind of points no longer will you be force-fed ads without getting some kind of value it makes a lot of sense because any publishers are making money off of users eyeballs through advertising right and through the data that they collect and pass along to advertisers in order to show ads on them on the site so they're

6:13there although everybody is kind of getting a little piece of this so it makes sense that the users would get something as well and I can see that model growing and as I mentioned before with gaming it's already you know it's already a big part of the gaming industry I think that the regular publishing industry like the online newspapers and blogs I think that they

6:37can actually see a lot of success with monetizing user base by actually offering them some sort of reward as well as you know access to premium content not throughout yeah you really need to have some added extra value or else you know people are just not being they just won't click on ads that even if they are catered to them if there's no value for them it

7:05seems that they need some extra compensation or points and things like that and especially in that mobile gaming industry it seems every game from farmville candy crush and all these popular mobile games have really built in that special advertising sort of rule where it's free but if you watch the videos and may not even have to convert and click on them but it's like

8:21well simply put we can ensure that you can the chain customers have the most options in terms of promoting their event to the widest and most relevant audience possible typically most events are just promoted on Facebook these days with you know organizers email lists as well and of course word of mouth which is great but if you're trying to reach a

8:43wider audience you need to really you know you really have to go find users wherever they are and they're not always on Facebook so we have the capability of preachy relevant users and figuring out who the who who might be interested we do haven't thought of before based on data datasets that we have and just some analytics that we can we can run across

9:36secure and isn't isn't going to be you know used by somebody else yeah that's great that we've partnered up like that because I believe that for our organizers it's all about ensuring that you understand who your customers are and even so if tickets have been resold it's very tough for organizers to know exactly who's at their event and their demographics psychographics so that you

10:03can provide the most value to those attendees and also get them the tickets they need for future events as many event organizers are holding events once a year or once a month and you want to ensure you retain your client base right exactly exactly and that's another thing is if you if you want to have multiple events you want to make sure that you keep track of the users that have come

10:26to your last event and either target them for your next one or maybe you don't want to target for your next one or you know Aiden ass but you know we have the ability to do to do both of those things that's great now as the blockchain Industry progresses as we are still quite early on many of the people that are trying to implement blockchain

10:50into the advertising industry are saying that there are many middlemen between the advertising agency and the end-user and these publishers and other middlemen do you foresee as blockchain grows and you know the timeline of this is a whole nother question but do you foresee the middlemen being cut out and there's being extra value for the end users and it being

11:13lower cost for the advertising agency well that's a really good question I think I think everybody's really talking about that in the programmatic advertising you know because you know right now on the industry has gotten so big but it's taken about ten years to get to where it is now and there are there are a fair number of players in between the advertisers and the users or

11:39the publishers but there's a reason for that and part of it is just the scale that we have now with the internet advertising before it was pretty simple if you wanted to advertise on a newspaper or a website you would actually call them and make a deal but nowadays through through data and through you know the need to advertise on multiple sites just not

12:10that feasible anymore especially considering that there's millions and millions and millions of apps and websites and potentially tens of thousands of advertisers that can advertise thanks but that's why there's some element now what has happened with all those little menaces gathers there's there's somewhat of a lack of transparency there's been some fraud

12:34there's you know all kinds of issues which is sort of a natural you know evolution of the industry being unfortunately so blockchain can really help with that just because it allows for a lot more transparency and Trust as well as just being able to track exactly who has delivered the app and where their weight and so I think that I think that's you know just introducing

13:02blockchain we will into a lot of these transactions will allow for a lot more trust and transparency between advertisers publishers that's great that you mentioned that and one of the other topics that Chane advertising companies have been touting is that there is a lot of ad fraud and then over the next ten years that could reach up to fifty billion

13:29dollars which is a whole industry in itself and as you just mentioned the advertising industry has taken about ten years to grow to how it is now with the size of the internet and with all of these agencies and blockchain technology mainly the start of Bitcoin only started ten years ago and it's still in early adoption it's really even now in the

13:53last five or three years it's still really in sort of the 1% of people that are actually utilizing this technology do you foresee because we do see there are solutions using blockchain technology it's just a matter of implementing them properly and providing adoption of that into the advertising industry do you foresee this to be a quick solution or maybe it will

14:16take another 10 years for this to be properly implemented well I don't think it's gonna sink in 10 years I hope it does but yeah we've been we've been working on fraud detection tools for about 6 years now I'm just being able to analyze individual devices and their behavior and by looking at those devices and have been paving determining whether they're

14:42fraudulent one no I think adding if we if we can find a way to add blog chain the – – to our ad campaigns with publishers and know exactly where they're getting delivered that will actually be a big step in eliminating a lot of the fraud that's happening yeah and are you guys right now looking to expand with more strategic partners

15:11globally or more investors or just more end customers yeah we're looking we're looking for we're always looking for more customers we're always looking for more strategic publishing partners of course you know I mean anybody who needs help with performance advertising or monetizing their site through data and advertising you know love to talk to them and investors I

15:39mean if they're interested in our vision and what we're doing of course you know as long as they're fun to work with we'd love to we'd love to talk to them so yeah we'd always were always open that's great Lyle and how can people learn more and get in contact with us yeah so you just go to our site connected interactive comm you can reach me my email as Lyle at connected to

16:03direct comm and I can relay you to the right person on my team we can help you amazing thank you so much for your time Lyle that's all the time that we have for today but it's been a pleasure speaking with you and learning about connected interactive and let's follow up in the near future thanks Ashley good to talk to you