Rocket Fuel CEO Randy Wooten, in a conversation with
AdExchanger'sJames Hercher, tried to explain the company's value proposition and challenges: “We’ve struggled since we
acquired x+1 [in August 2014] to communicate to the market who we are and what our distinct value prop is,” he said. Wooten continued: "At its most basic, being a platform means you can have a
set of customers interact with you in a self-service way. Everything is in the interface and you only need Rocket Fuel if something breaks or there are issues on the back end. When you have managed
service, and this was part of Rocket Fuel’s criticism early on regarding margins and being a 'black box,' it was hard for people to understand the value we brought to the chain. It was almost
heretical in the media world talking about our network as services. If you’re Google or Microsoft, you throw in campaign analytics and services as part of the CPM charge. In the classic software
world, you buy the tech and then pay for the services: managed service, support, training, whatever the added service is."
Wooten continued: "So this whole idea of having services to be
monetized is different. We started with 40 products – direct marketing, three flavors of PMP, video, CPA (cost per action) campaigns, cross-device, mobile, different DMP features sold as
products, programmatic TV, etc. – we were trying to sell to everybody, instead approaching each company with a holistic solution."
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