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Oridian’s Intelligence Initiative: Bob Regular Explains His Company’s Move to Consolidate and Smarten Up

Written on
November 9th 2006
Author
by Kiran Aditham  |
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So that’s why the ARG/Oridian deal took place.

That’s the reason for the deal. The reason for the deal is essentially about verticalization and cross-pollinating intelligence, a mind-link. In all sincerity, a lot of the deals are based on people. You have to have personalities that match, and you have to have people that see the same vision. It’s not numbers entirely; people have got to want to be together. It’s a marriage. So, Oridian has always had a really good relationship with Active Response Group and vice versa. The Active Response Group team is very impressive and proven their talent through excessive growth. There’s a hunger inside both companies to go play ball against the heavy people, so there’s this common urgency to win.

It’s a dogfight.

We’re working hard to compete is a very tough market full of impressive players like Google, ValueClick and Advertising.com. It is a dogfight, and we’re the next tier down from all of that. In order to go up to that level, not only do you have to duplicate in some respects what they’re doing.

But you have to be a lot smarter about how you use the limited resources that you have, while they get thicker, and bigger. The way to do that, unfortunately, is to spend less time on the issues that make you very modest amounts of money and more time on the issues that make you a lot of money. The only way to find out is the cross-pollination of that intelligence, that’s the only way to know. If I continue to remain separate, no one’s going to help me become smarter. So as we come together, we can start working towards—and I’m not silly enough to believe that we’re at an Advertising.com or ValueClick size—but we understand that there’s market share to gain.

You had that vision in mind?

We can see that’s what necessary is to grow strong, in-house product suites, and to capitalize on distribution methods of those products and offers, and really do a better job at yield. This is all about yield, all day long, it’s about making the most amount of money from every single impression that you show. How you do that is entirely intelligence of the system, which deals to put in, which publishers to buy, everything. Front-to-back, there’s that analytics, and this will allow us to see what we should be doing on those fronts.

So why is now the time for this union?

The market is getting blazingly smart. That tends to be like a crutch that people like to use to make themselves feel better that they’re in the Internet industry. They’re in this cool space. There is a lot of rhetoric that’s padding our industry, but the reality is that in the last three years, things are moving extremely fast. You have Yahoo and Google battling it out, MSN Search attempting to go battle it out now for good and for bad. You have AOL trying to make a play into it somehow. Everybody’s trying to get market share. They’re all trying to grow by either stealing away or inventing something new. Fair enough, it’s like any business.

But you don’t see AIG, the insurance company, battling it out for 10-20 points of market share back and forth with the next largest insurance company every other day. If they grow by .2%, everybody does a big “rah!’

There is a quick fix need in this industry.

Innovate now or die. You’ve heard that a million times, right? The problem is that the innovation that’s already happened is so significant, and so real—not vaporware—that you can’t innovate today to fix that. You really have to have a plan, you really have to grow what it is you’re building, and have a meaningful vision of say, a year from now, I need to deploy.

What are the benefits on the technology side?

Oridian’s technology is a real-time optimization tool for display, and Active Response’s technology is a real-time optimization tool for lead generation and co-registration. As we bolt those together to talk to each other, they shouldn’t act as separate-minded platforms with their own agenda. They should act as one platform for one purpose, which is maximizing yield. If they’re both talking the same language, then maximizing yield will be a common goal.

Then, you look for making it more efficient, which is things like behavioral. You add in behavioral targeting, types of contextual, and then you look at your distribution methods—search, display, emails, whatever else you’re generating. All of those then get different yield factors based on the type of traffic they generate, and the system just grinds out positive yield for the advertisers.

So, the reason for the deal, though, I don’t think in 2007, you can just be a lead generation company, or just a display company, or just a search company, and make progress to compete going forward. I think verticalization and consolidation will have to grow faster, and have to happen more, because the intelligence on the heavyweights—Google, Advertising.com—is getting so significant that there’s on low-hanging fruit efficiencies to grab anymore by being alone. It’s not good enough. You can’t be an island.

The reason for the deal, now, is that Brad and myself both see this as looking out the window. It’s 2007, and if you’re not ready to bring it together, then you’ll be marginalized. You’ll be marginalized as a company. You’ll still make money, you’ll still grow a little bit. Life will not be evil, and it’ll still be fun Internet stuff. But then, Google and everybody will be that much further away and intelligent, and everybody else will be that much further dumber and unable to bridge the gap.



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