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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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It’s been several months since the re-branding, what has the reaction been like internally and externally?

It’s clear to everybody. We have two distinct sales forces now. Now, the Kanoodle people are calling on the search buyer, and the Pulse people are calling on the content buyer, the online media buyer, and the search marketing firm depending. It has made our pitch much [simpler], it has made the sale process much simpler and we’ve just been closing much more business. Everybody recognizes the distinction between the two businesses. In a weird way, it’s as if we spent three years paddling upstream, we did one big change, and everyone’s like “Oh, OK.” It’s funny because the success was in how much we didn’t need to talk about it anymore.

You believe it was just an implicit paradigm shift.

Correct. In many ways, it was self-affirming so I think it was a huge homerun for us as a business. It’s not just galvanized the agency, it has really galvanized the employees internally. It was complicated to pitch both businesses and understand what management was trying to share with the two visions of the business. But it has been much easier to galvanize the employees around the nuances or our business, and that helped tremendously. I listen now and I hear people talking on the phone within the company, and the elevator pitch is right no matter who’s on the phone.

We’ve got great feedback from the market. It’s easy for advertisers to get their arms around this, and that’s been the most rewarding piece.

What are your 2007 online ad forecasts, industry-wide and as pertaining to Seevast’s business model?

There are three things I see in ‘07. One is video…for all advertising. But I actually think there’s a real opportunity for text-based advertising in video. So the same sponsored links model but in video, video being an additive inventory. I think that’s going to be really important. I would then take the second point and tie it to that, which is social networks. Those two types of inventory are billions of page views, and vast audiences with very different make-ups. They’re so broad and so vast that they cover such wide demographics that the ability to reach those audiences with multiple targeting methodologies—which is my third point—[makes] 2007 a really exciting, coming-together year because of it.

Before social networks came and now video, people thought “Well, it’s all market share and there isn’t that much more inventory.” But the marketplace just proved that wrong. Web inventory is endless and we’re just going to add billions and billions more pages. Then, the questions becomes, “Gee, is context?”, which is still i.e. how either Google and Yahoo refer to this business. We invented that name, we had started it, and we were the first to drop it in light of it really being content targeting. What that means is, how do you best drive yield off of content pages?

One way to target is context. Clearly, demo is another, behavior is another, local and geo-targeting are more. For us, it’s recognizing that inventory like video and social networks that are so vast require multiple targeting opportunities in order to drive the highest yield out of them. I think there’s going to be a lot of recognition of that in ‘07.

Video seems to be the perennial hot-button issue as of late.

It’s very nice for us. We have a narrow focus on what video means. Video is an opportunity for us to sell more advertising. That allows us to be less focused on the evolution—for us, it’s like anything else. When we were at Sprinks, we innovated the idea of putting ads in email. No one had been thinking about putting text-based, bid-based ads in email then. We did it, and email was hot, and we were running billions of page views that way.

Video now is and it’s a platform. I’m fortunate enough not to have to think about all the nuances and aspects of how video’s evolving except to know that we need to be able to monetize it with advertising, and that’s what keeps us focused.



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