AdTech may be poised for consolidation in the coming 18 months, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t still barriers to be overcome, opportunities to be taken advantage of. Mobile advertising is only working for a handful of people, but it’s still marginal in compared to display, video, or social advertising.
Enter Ogury. Before we talk about how this company is taking on mobile advertising, let’s talk about back story. The startup’s founders include Jean Canzoneri & Thomas Pasquest, previously cofounders of BeeAd, which was sold to Teads, a company which is poised to IPO in 2015 and has been carrying the title “the next Criteo” since its merger with Ebuzzing last year. Canzoneri said in a telephone interview that the technology and expertise acquired by Teads represents about 50% of the startup’s 2014 annual revenue, which was roughly €100 Million.
The team is completed with the likes of Yan Georget (formerly VP of Engineering at Criteo, now CTO of Ogury), Raphael Rodier (Former Head of Display Advertising at Hi-Media), Boris Clemencon (former Data Science at reputed R&D facility INRIA), Adam Rubach (Business Director UK for Struq, a Criteo competitor) &Jacopo Ercolani (Head of Mobile, Teads). Needless to say, the team is well-staffed. In fact, the startup already raised a pre-seed round of €1.5 Million from Ventech, ACG & CoVent Partners, and they’ve already grown to 40 team members. Ogury has already run 250 campaigns with UK, French & Italian clients stretching across 20 countries.
What & How
While major players like Criteo are focusing on the mobile web, getting the same granular level of information about what smartphone users are doing across silo-ed apps is difficult. While Canzoneri wouldn’t reveal the secret sauce of how they get their information, he assured me that the process is entirely opt-in from an end-consumer perspective. In order to reach their more than 100 Million profiles so far, Ogury works “in the blind” with 600 Publishers – Ogury doesn’t reveal the name of the publishers he’s working with so that premium editors may continue to sell advertising directly to brands without the worry that those brands will undercut them by going through Ogury.
Canzoneri says that customers keep coming back because Ogury knows more about mobile users than any other network, including Facebook (which uses its own Facebook Connect tool to learn about users), Criteo & Twitter. Their technology allows them to know every page, every action, every screen that users look at – a difficult task without integrating across every single app – and they can do this just by integrating with one app on a user’s mobile phone.