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The Online Sea Change: Seevast CEO Lance Podell Talks Rebranding and Reemerging in the Video-Centric New Year

Written on
January 19th 2007
Author
by Kiran Aditham  |
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Sounds like a natural evolution.

It felt like a natural evolution to me. For me, being at the bleeding edge has always been my career. I have been in large, corporate 500 companies in the division that was doing the different thing: trying online, trying interactive television, trying investing in Web properties and then using those investments to generate content for the businesses we had. I put American Express up on AOL before anybody was really thinking that way, and then got into comparison shopping where everybody thought there was no way they would research for a product online. My career has definitely been about trying to time the market to how it was evolving, and I don’t know whether I’ve done a good job or not at that, but that seems to have been how I’ve moved through my career.

Also, innovating content targeted sponsored links, taking the search business but changing it on its head is sort of the same idea.

It is a huge business now.

Isn’t that funny, and I’d like to think I could take some credit for that. Why not, right? If I won’t, who will? (Laughs)

This was the impetus for your post at Kanoodle. Were you a founder?

No, Kanoodle was founded in 1999, and its initial beginnings were search-based sponsored links. When I was able to get the Sprinks division sold to Google—because I believe in many ways we had really innovated content targeted sponsored links and now it was interesting and compelling to Google and Yahoo—, there was a VC firm called Inside Venture Partners that was looking at investing in Kanoodle. I was hired, with some team members of mine from About and Sprinks, to bring Kanoodle out of just search-based sponsored links into content targeted sponsored links.

When were at Sprinks, we were cut of at the knees if you will, once the Google deal started to happen, from really building out our vision. And we were hired to bring that vision to Kanoodle. So, it was the next generation of Kanoodle, not the first.

Let’s talk about the big shift with the Kanoodle re-branding.

The big shift in re-branding was taking what we’ve been working on here, and acknowledging it structurally. Kanoodle, when I joined, was the operating company and the product brand. That was great, but as we started to pick up new products and got into Pulse 360 and then acquired Moniker in the domain space, all of a sudden the Kanoodle name didn’t take us far enough. Kanoodle really meant sponsored links for search pages. So when we went out to call on advertisers and agencies for what was not yet Pulse 360, we were trying to explain why we weren’t Kanoodle all the time. Too much of the sell was spent trying to explain why this was something other than search. So that by formalizing it, the doors opened much more readily and people now understood the distinction.

We opened up many more doors on the advertiser and agency side, started to call on the right people, and started to close business much more rapidly because people understood the two businesses were different. It also allowed us, as a marketing services organization dedicated to building our clients’ businesses, to fit Moniker in the umbrella—Moniker is a domain asset management company—to focus on their clients’ core assets and helping leverage those, which falls into the Seevast umbrella of marketing services companies that help clients build their businesses.

So, it’s had a lot of legs. It took on more and more meaning as we got into it. It started as a way to separate the Kanoodle business into two, and it has really taken on a life that has been tremendous for us. The clarity was just immediate for people.



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