Connexus To Merge With Epic Advertising
- by Gavin O'Malley @mp_gavin, March 24, 2010
The combined company plans to provide various digital marketing services, from brand-building to customer acquisition. By combining their technology platforms, the companies expect to launch an integrated demand-side ad platform for clients.
Given the increasing complexity and specialized nature of digital advertising, agencies can't have too many resources, according to Don Mathis, CEO of Epic Advertising -- formerly AzoogleAds.
"Delivering successful digital advertising campaigns requires scale, technology and execution," he said. "Scale is reach and scale begets data ... And data begets relevance for the advertisers' campaigns."
The Traffic Marketplace technology platform integrates data from multiple sources in an effort to increase relevance for advertisers, with a specialty in correlating intent-based data to improve its targeting and analytics.
Epic's technology, meanwhile, attempts to leverage a patent-pending approach to improving the effect of brand-focused campaigns on customer acquisition programs. The company claims to work with 45,000 advertisers and publishers in the United States and abroad.
In 2008, Internet service provider ASIS filed a spam lawsuit against Epic, arguing that the company violated the federal CAN-SPAM law by using an affiliate that allegedly arranged for more than 10,000 email ads to be sent. Late last year, a federal appellate court upheld an order dismissing the lawsuit.
The combined entity has offices in Los Angeles, New York, Toronto, London, San Francisco, Chicago, Dallas, Detroit and the Silicon Valley.
I’ll make my points brief, since I’ve espoused about this incessantly since 2006: There isn’t really a need for affiliate networks in their current iteration. Plain and simple, when COPEAC/eAdvertising/MarketLeverage/W4/Clickbooth/AKMG/C2M/Ads4Dough have a 50% offer overlap/redundancy, there is no need for this glut. We have been spoiled in the affiliate marketing space over the last half-decade due to the influx of dollars and seemingly turnkey ability to ‘find an offer and launch to great affiliates.’ However, the duplication game is up; white labels do NOT matter, and ‘exclusives’ all too often turn out to be derivatives of existing, saturated offers.
Publishers are too savvy to fall for the euphemisms & spin, and by this point the direct advertisers are connected enough to find the quality partners themselves. This, in turn, leaves us with one option: FIND CAMPAIGNS THAT DO NOT EXIST IN OUR SPACE. This is why Bardon was able to launch in the midst of the greatest Affiliate Market saturation in dot.com history and immediately begin producing revenue and profitability – this was 100% on the backs of our campaigns, a unique model (up to that point) with flexibility to own, control and create new back & front ends. The only way to survive is to be unique, and that is what we need to do.
Our expansion and growth needs to rely on one of two things: 1) creation of our own offers (outside of the Bardon paradigm) and 2) finding advertisers and agencies that are NOT in our space, introducing them to the ‘big bad world’ of online performance marketing, working through meetings, .ppt presentations, slower business cycles, small budgets and tight constraints and earning their trust because we KNOW our traffic channels and quality, thus proving that we can be their trusted AoR, and build their brand in the traditional Agency sense; targeted, smart, paced growth that leads to a real relationship. This is where the revenue is, and this is where our long-term success will be derived.