Link: Q & A with TellApart CEO Josh McFarland
Josh authored a blog post on the digital media blog Adexchanger.com which nicely summarizes answers to some frequently asked questions:
http://www.adexchanger.com/platforms/tellapart/
Read through to learn more about our business model, our target market, and the revenue problems that we’re tackling on behalf of our clients.
-Dave (Head of Product Marketing, you’ll see me post here frequently)
Internet Retailer magazine highlights our launch, including a great interview with Hayneedle CMO Ash ElDifrawi on the return on ad spend through TellApart’s platform vs. those of any other online display efforts.
Last night TellApart co-founders Josh McFarland and Mark Ayzenshtat sat down with TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington to discuss our data platform, our technology and some of our client success stories.
The link to the full article can be found here.
And yes, it was a very small table 
This article appeared on AdExchanger.com on April 13, 2010
Dear retargeting advertiser –
We all agree online advertising needs a more comprehensive metric than the click. But the view-through (or post-impression) conversion is not it — especially for your retargeting campaigns. In fact, if you’re being billed for view-through conversions from your current provider, you are massively overpaying for events which were going to happen anyway. You’ve likely witnessed this first hand as you’ve tried to de-duplicate vendors’ conversion reports, typically finding the sales were already attributed to another channel altogether. Or perhaps you’ve had the joy of trying to understand why these view-through volumes outweigh click conversions by 10:1 (or worse!).
Why has the view-through become the default measure of campaign efficacy? If Gian Fulgoni were to be believed, it’s because the people who click on display ads are young, stupid, poor, out of work gamblers who spend an inordinate amount of time bidding for junk on eBay; not only are clicks irrelevant, they’re detrimental to the campaign! Dubious studies aside, I believe there’s a more powerful reason the view-through reigns today: it’s easily used to defraud advertisers.
As evidence, I invite you to install Firebug for Firefox and watch its display of third-party ad network traffic throughout your day on the internet. Visit the homepage of CrateandBarrel.com and – bam! – sixteen (16!) ad network pixels are immediately loaded in your browser. Then, as you navigate publisher sites which are using ad networks, you’ll see how a single ad unit can piggyback tens of additional cookies! And that doesn’t even include Flash cookies or server-side (aka Pixel-Free) cookies owned by the likes of Acerno/Akamai, which are invisible to the user.
What’s happening here is not new. The affiliate industry, which went through a similar and painful learning curve years ago, has a term for it — cookie stuffing: the insidious practice of sprinkling affiliate code-enabled cookies on as many users across the Internet as possible… knowing some fraction of them will organically “convert” before the cookie expires, thus giving credit for events which in no way were affected by the affiliate’s campaigns. And retargeting campaign view-throughs are like cookie stuffing on steroids because the targeting focuses on users who are infinitely more likely to return naturally! Unlike the affiliate world, however, these are not smalltime arbitrageurs; this is cookie stuffing at scale, performed by big retargeting providers and major ad networks.
Now, it would be naive to assert the view-through has no place as a metric. Indeed, my own company’s rigorous A:B testing of our retargeting campaigns can prove that view-through value does exist. But this validated view-through lift is complex — massively influenced by all of your other marketing programs and general business performance, rising and falling in volume from week to week. It’s also hard to measure, requiring large (and costly) control campaigns to be simultaneously run.
And there’s the rub — there is no valid way to enter into a pay-for-view-throughs agreement with a retargeting provider. Doing so immediately mis-aligns interests and incentivizes the vendor to spam your users with cookies in an attempt to take credit for sales which were going to happen anyway.
This leaves just one conclusion: retargeting campaigns’ value should be tied to the click, specifically clicks that convert. You should demand high CTRs from your retargeting efforts and from any campaign that uses your own audience data for targeting. Sorry, Gian — the click is back — and I believe you’ll see an evolution of display advertising business models that embrace it: either via click-based CPA or via CPC.
Remember, if you find yourself having to de-dupe your vendors’ conversion reports, you’ve just uncovered the real issue:
You’re being duped.
Welcome to The Combine — the official TellApart blog. With the unveiling of our new website you’re probably wondering, what’s up with all the wheat?
When we were Entrepreneurs in Residence at Greylock Partners, we started working on a bunch of ideas which centered around big data problems. But, as is true with most data sets, the size of the corpus alone is not what’s important… it’s the ability to identify the meaningful features within the data, and then to build the feedback loops on top, that let us refine the big data into big value. And so, we nicknamed our efforts “Project Combine” in a nod to the software machinery we would build to help separate this digital wheat from the chaff.
As we dived into the most pressing problems of our e-commerce clients over the past year, we immediately identified a common thread. While these companies were being bombarded with marketing pitches from companies trying to sell them new data (both online and offline), their own customer data was hardly being used. Basic problems pervaded: customer data stored at the transaction level instead of being rolled up to global customer IDs, transactional data entirely and irrevocably separated from web analytics data, no way to determine if a current website visitor had ever been an earlier buyer, etc.
For decades, offline direct marketers (catalogers, loyalty card programs, casinos, etc.) have invested stunning amounts of effort and money in the management of their customer data. Catalogers, especially, knew that profit and revenue growth were found in the careful manicuring of their “house file” — a comprehensive list of everyone who had been mailed and who had made a past purchase, down to exactly when and what they bought. The predictive strength of this data, along with the modeling and data cooperatives commonly used in the industry, meant that every person could be given a score representing their likelihood of purchasing again. And this score was used to determine who would receive a given mailing — either as a repeat or entirely new customer.
So why is it that many of these lessons have yet to be applied online? Because most of the industry’s efforts for the past eight years have gone toward optimizing the search funnel. Now that search marketing has become tremendously expensive and has reached a point of diminishing returns, we believe the time has come for e-commerce companies to return focus to their customer base. We founded TellApart to adapt and transfer this knowledge.
In addition to getting this data out from behind the firewall, syncing it in format that can be unified at the customer level and putting it in the cloud, companies need to make this information addressable. It’s no longer about the names and addresses in the house file… it’s about the user list: virtual representations of customers backed by tremendous amounts of online data — which we model to help our clients “tell apart” their highest value users from the rest. Simply, the cookie list is the new mailing list. Once identified, these high value customers can begin to have differentiated experiences — both on and off the e-commerce site — through channels like display ads, offers, recommendations and improved customer service. We believe Customer Quality can be measured and is the cornerstone to refining all marketing efforts in the future.
Our team includes some of the best minds from online retail, finance, and software companies like Google, Oracle and LinkedIn. And we have collective deep knowledge and experience in the areas of high performance cloud-based computing, massive scale data storage frameworks like Hadoop, e-commerce analytics and online advertising.
If the caliber of these people and these kind of ideas excite you, subscribe to our feed, follow us on Twitter, contact us below, or check out our open positions! We look forward to sharing our progress in building TellApart into the de-facto customer data platform for online commerce companies.
Josh McFarland & Mark Ayzenshtat — Founders, TellApart
