Spotlight

Philip Kaplan Builds the Marketplace for Online Advertising

Written on: January 25th 2006
Author: by Kiran Aditham |
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In between slurps of soup, Kaplan tells me that even with a groundbreaking product on his hands, he initially wasn’t interested in making AdBrite its own entity. “It was not as popular or as big as F***edCompany, but it was the [concept] that really had no limits as to how big it could get… [But] it was a tough decision for me. For the previous five years, I had basically been working at home by myself in my underwear. I had to make the decision if I wanted really turn [Adbrite] into a big company.”

It turned out that getting dressed wasn’t as hard as it might have seemed. Kaplan eventually decided to take the plunge with AdBright and by mid-2004, he secured $4 million in VC money from Sequoia Capital (the same company that had funded many of the dotcoms he trashed, as well as current mainstays like Google, Yahoo and Oracle).

“I said if I could be involved with these guys, then I don’t want to be involved with anybody else. So I had meetings set up with them, went out there from New York. Sequoia very quickly gave me an offer. The venture capitalists in New York are all slick banker guys with shiny hair and fancy suits. Everyone on the west coast is a geeky entrepreneur—my people!”

Today, AdBrite ranks as another unqualified success in Kaplan’s career path. According to comScore Media Matrix, the site has jumped from 4.2 million visitors (during its November 2004 launch) to nearly 20 million users in present day. And while F***edCompany remains a functional entity, Kaplan’s interests are clearly and firmly vested in AdBrite: he spends most of his time in the company’s San Francisco headquarters, surrounded by his techie brethren from Silicon Valley. Kaplan’s simple yet brilliant game plan with AdBrite fits right in place as the Internet becomes an increasingly quantifiable medium.

“Advertising as a whole was very much an art,” he says. “Now, it’s really turning into a science. It’s all about performing. If there’s an advertiser who’s spending $.11 and making $.10, that seems to be our customer. Back in the 90s, everything was banner ads. Then everything was text ads. And now everything’s going back to banner ads.”

And given that online promotions are now behaviorally oriented, Kaplan explains, “We are starting to experiment with more intrusive ads. When you’re watching a TV program, it’s ok to stop the show for 2 ½ minutes and play you straight commercials. [But] can you remember any Internet ads you saw? Obviously people go to websites they enjoy. So I think advertisements are going to get a lot more interactive.”

It seems fair to assume that Philip Kaplan will have plenty of involvement in this interactive revolution. The self-professed “dork” and heavy metal fan has outshined many of his more studied colleagues in the past few years with nothing more than intuition, a funny idea and some C++ skills. And it’s a fact he’s not unwilling to promote.

“I always felt that I knew so much more than a lot these dotcom guys,” he tells me as we wrap up our lunch. “I felt like I had more experience. I always felt that I should be the one with the great idea. I would sometime psych myself out by saying, ‘Oh, I don’t have an MBA, these guys are from Stanford, and these guys must know much more than I know.’ But it turns out they didn’t really.”