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5 Innovative Ad Tech Companies You Should Know About

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There are hundreds of companies in the ad tech industry competing for a vast and growing amount of money. These companies range in size from Google, the dominant player, to tiny startups you’ve never heard of.

To thrive in this environment of intense competition, independent ad tech companies will have to be uniquely good in specific niches so that their services are in demand no matter who controls the market.

Here are five ad tech companies that have navigated the competition by becoming leaders in their respective niches:

1. AdRoll: Retargeting

Founded in 2008, AdRoll was one of the pioneers of ad retargeting, the technology that serves you ads based on products or services you have recently browsed online.

For example, if you look at a bike made by Trek—one of AdRoll’s clients—AdRoll’s technology can make sure you see Trek ads on your desktop, tablet and smartphone every day for the next week. This technology is one of the most potent tools marketers have for boosting ROI because it helps them go after the consumers most likely to be converted for a sale. It is also one of the ad tech niches that the larger companies, like Google, haven’t come to dominate.

What sets it apart from the competition:

Within this niche, AdRoll has set itself apart with flexibility. Its customers can drill down into AdRoll’s data to see the individual sites on which their ads run. They can also decide what the ads look like. (Many competitors retain control of these elements.)

Other leaders in retargeting include Criteo (big in Europe and South America), Vizury (huge in Asia), Sociomantic and Retargeter. But AdRoll retains the dominant position and, with its deep pockets, has been acquiring smaller firms itself.

2. Tapad: Cross-device advertising

Tapad solves one of the crucial puzzles of ad tech: how does a marketer follow an individual from device to device? It’s harder than you might think.

These days, people own many devices, they share some of them, and there isn’t any comprehensive registry of which phones and laptops go with which people.

To fill this gap, Tapad uses complex algorithms to create a “probabilistic device graph,” which tells marketers how likely it is that the user of one device is the same as the user of another. Marketers can make advertising decisions and measure the performance of campaigns based on the resulting confidence interval.

This is a good niche to be in because it allows Tapad to be agnostic about who ultimately wins the battle over market share for ad exchanges and other segments of the larger ad tech market. Whoever is buying and selling ads, they need to be able to confidently determine they’re reaching the right consumers.

What sets it apart from the competition:

Other companies use only “deterministic data” to track device users. Such data includes verifiable actions like logins or check-ins, but it’s less scalable. For example, it is of no use when a user is simply browsing a public website.

Tapad’s technology uses deterministic data as a way to verify the “probabilistic data” its algorithms generate. This robust approach allows clients to track users across a wide range of web activities.

Several competitors, such as Drawbridge and Bluecava, use a similar approach. But some industry observers believe Tapad’s technology is the most advanced. Oracle and Nielsen seem to agree. They have licensed Tapad’s tech for their own platforms, Datalogix and eXelate, respectively.

3. MediaMath: Demand-side

No marketing team can manually buy thousands of ads across half a dozen ad exchanges daily. So the buy side of ad tech has been largely automated by and consolidated onto demand-side platforms (DSPs) like the one offered by MediaMath.

MediaMath and other DSPs, like DataXu and Google’s DoubleClick Bid Manager, compete on the quality of their algorithms: how well can the platform judge the value of an impression and thus place the optimal bid? Small, incremental improvements in these algorithms can yield significant savings or enhanced ROI when multiplied by thousands of daily transactions, so competition among DSPs is fierce. The DSP niche is also unusual because it is big enough and competitive enough that, despite Google’s presence, there is still room for independent competitors.

What sets it apart from the competition:

MediaMath is the leading independent company in the category. Its DSP scores higher than its competitors, including Google, in user satisfaction, according to G2 Crowd, a closely watched ratings site for B2B tech products.

This metric matters because, after the quality of the algorithms, usability is the next most important differentiator. For MediaMath, the formula is working. Annual revenue is reportedly in the range of $300-400 million and the company says it is profitable.

Recently it bought a company called Upcast, which has enabled it to expand its platform’s buying reach to ads on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms.

4. StartApp: Mobile ad and monetization

Many ad networks compete to serve ads within mobile apps on phones and tablets. These companies partner with app developers and take responsibility for serving and, sometimes, designing the apps’ ads.

StartApp was one of the pioneers in this space, and was just named the fastest growing company in New York. It led the way toward designing “native” ads specifically for mobile user interfaces rather than simply shrinking website banner ads to fit on mobile screens.

What sets it apart from the competition:

StartApp has several formidable competitors, such as the mobile ad networks inMobi, Tapjoy, AdMob by Google, and Audience Network by Facebook. But the company has remained at the forefront of its niche by continuing to lead innovation in ad design.

StartApp invests heavily in understanding how mobile users want to experience ads, and then designs and offers such ad units as part of its SDK. For example, last month the company unveiled a new 360-degree ad that uses a mobile device’s gyroscope to provide a highly interactive and panoramic ad.

Today, StartApp is among the largest mobile ad platforms, with 200,000 apps having integrated the SDK and more than 350 million monthly active users.

5. Oomph: Print to digital translation

As traditional print publishers have increasingly moved towards web and mobile platforms, they’ve looked for ways to bring their print ads with them. Companies like Oomph help them do this.

Oomph takes ads designed for print publications and turns them into rich media ads. That is, ads specifically designed to take advantage of the functionality of web pages and, especially, tablets and smartphones. This kind of design work is a specialized skill that most of Oomph’s clients — large enterprises, publishers and ad agencies — don’t want to develop in-house.

The service is valuable because it slashes cost and time of print-to-digital translation and allows publishers to sell ads across both print and mobile platforms in a single transaction, instead of through separate deals for each media.

What sets it apart from the competition:

While Oomph doesn’t have to worry about Facebook or Google invading its market, it does compete with another kind of giant, Adobe, whose InDesign software can accomplish some of the same things Oomph’s technology does.

Oomph differentiates itself by specializing, allowing itself to offer more specifically relevant services to its customers at a lower price point.

Oomph’s print to digital translation work is a perfect example of the kind of niche in which small and mid-size ad tech companies can thrive, even against major competitors. As long as advertisers are buying digital ad space from publishers — the only constant in this industry — there will be opportunities for ad tech companies to present niche solutions.

What are some other ad tech companies you know that specialize in niche areas? Share in the comments below!

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