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Since its founding, Bidtellect has evolved and expanded its capabilities to meet client and market needs, now offering native, banner, outstream video, and instream video channels. Most importantly, Bidtellect’s attention to performance has led to advancements in its proprietary optimization technology, surpassing advertiser goals while saving them money, and context-driven capabilities: which were first a performance tactic for native placements, and now satisfy privacy and brand safety needs of industry players as the 3rd party cookie deprecates. In an interview with CIO Applications, Lon Otremba, CEO of Bidtellect, discusses how his company has been helping clients achieve their goals by implementing the right technology in the programmatic advertising ecosystem.
Could you provide a brief overview of your company?
Bidtellect is the brainchild of industry veterans and pioneers who believed that the next frontier of digital advertising would focus on the performance of ads in ways that prior generations didn’t. Our founders wanted to drive the idea that ads appearing natively within web pages or in the context of the content were as valuable as the content itself and would perform better for advertisers than traditional banner advertising. This is the foundational idea on which Bidtellect was formed with the goal of what we now call “powering smarter advertising.” In 2014, we launched a commercially viable digital ad-buying platform to deliver digital ads that act as content previews across all devices and IAB-approved native formats and video. Over the last seven years, the platform has evolved and advanced significantly in terms of privacy, brand safety, scale, speed, performance metrics, and more.
What are some of the pain points that your clients face in the digital advertising space?
From a buyer’s perspective, the cost is always the number one priority, which boils down to working media. Buyers, which include advertisers and advertising agencies, want to make sure that the majority of every ad dollar they spend is utilized in acquiring media. In addition to buying the media, advertisers today have to spend on additional features to ensure brand safety and more. Our technology is aimed at maximizing the working media for the advertiser to deliver the best results. Since ads first appeared 500 years ago, identifying how consumers respond to an ad and their level of engagement with a particular product has always been a pain point. We want to utilize our technology to enhance engagement so that people respond positively to advertisements.
How has Bidtellect positioned itself to help its clients overcome the aforementioned challenges?
We always place the advertiser and the advertiser’s performance on the top of the priority list when it comes to positioning our technology in the market, ensuring the best possible results for the client for every dollar they spend on advertisement
Advanced capabilities around the context and placement of ads on web pages have been necessary to ensure that ads look like they are part of the content. With third-party cookies soon to be deprecated from browser platforms, we are taking that inherent capability and doubling down on it in terms of contextual targeting and contextual performance capabilities that don’t rely on individual cookie identification to produce highly effective and high-quality results. This focus on contextual capabilities is the foundation for our next generation of cookie-less advertising solutions that we’re rolling out into the market now.
Could you share a customer success story where Bidtellect’s expertise in digital advertising helped clients achieve their goals?
A government-led anti-smoking health organization, which had initially been working across broadcast TV and radio, approached us to develop a large-scale digital advertising campaign utilizing native formats and our optimization technology. Being a government-led organization, we had to comply with several brand safety and disclosure requirements. We worked with the client and developed contextual targeting within different vertical content—news, science, health, family wellness, parenting, and education. In addition, we layered behavioral targeting capabilities around specific actions that might be taken, followed by heavy geographic and zip code targeting. We let the math do the work in optimizing the capabilities around targeting and developed the best way to meet the client’s objectives in terms of who they want to reach with the message and what results they expect from it. The results were phenomenal. The company that partnered with us for small test features initially has now turned into an evergreen partnership. As we kept introducing new ways to optimize and expand, the client shifted more of its capabilities onto our technology platform to achieve the best possible results.
What are some of the key factors that enable Bidtellect to stand out amongst its competitors?
We are performance specialists in the native and contextual digital advertising landscape and have always prided ourselves on punching above our weight. We cater to some of the biggest brands in the world, and it is always a challenge to outperform your competition when you are dealing with demanding clients. But our customercentric attitude has helped us serve our clients in the best possible way and enabled them to perform better.
We are keenly focused on the growth and wellbeing of our employees, striving to make the best decisions to facilitate a positive work culture at Bidtellect. Being a “Bidtellectual” is something every employee here strongly identifies with. We have a solid and identifiable set of core values that we stay true to when working with our clients.
What does a typical client onboarding process at Bidtellect entail?
To truly understand what the client wants and ensure that we deliver the same, we bring in the client for focus group discussions and test the features requested by them. If a client comes to us with a specific need, we take a deep dive into understanding the impact of that project on our overall platform performance and for every other client that we have. If the proposed return on investment for a particular feature or enhancement is strong, we include it in our roadmap and develop and release it. Over the years, we have had several client requirements that seemed like one-offs but turned out to have enormous crossplatform benefits for ourselves and all our customers.
What does the future hold for Bidtellect look like?
There is an apparent lack of understanding of the concept of digital advertising and how it works. The idea is to create an open marketplace with technologies that provide the most efficient ways to manage the marketplace on behalf of ad buyers and publishers. Our goal is to facilitate such an ecosystem where technology does all the heavy lifting, creating a fair, open, and safe advertising environment for brands, consumers, and publishers. We are constantly endeavoring to help people understand the role of technology in the digital advertising ecosystem while simultaneously increasing the types of ad formats that can be run through our platform.
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