I’m in the San Francisco Bay area and love seeing hot startups launch cool products. One of those cool products that I saw launch this year is AdStage.io. They launch a while back at the Launch conference, to which I attended. It was fun seeing people in the PPC space launching cool products. Since then they have been working hard on a killer cross-platform product as well as making it convenient on an iPad today!
AdStage was formally launched at the LAUNCH Conference in March 2013 (Video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59SW13g6nqg) where they won Best Business. They’ve since granted exclusive beta access to over 1,300 brands and businesses, allowing them to run campaigns across Google AdWords, Bing Ads, Facebook and LinkedIn from a single, intelligent interface.
It’s frustrating that the only tools out there today are power tools designed for sophisticated online advertisers and are incredibly hard to use. These tools have high minimum spend requirements and spit out a cryptic wall of data for analysts to decode.
The goal for AdStage is to become the starting point for online advertising where, without much prior knowledge, advertisers can experiment with advertising on multiple networks with ease. Many of the current tools that are positioned for smaller spenders are just retrofitted enterprise software. But accessible tools need to be built as such from day 1 and from the ground up. They started with AdStage Express, which is targeted more towards SMBs. Approaching the market from the bottom up will allow us to design experiences that make sense and work for the respective advertisers. We don’t plan to force-feed the market with tools that require training and account managers to use.
I asked Sahil Jain, CEO and Co-Founder about why he created Adstage and he said: “Many veterans in the ad industry are telling us we’re crazy for going after the market from the bottom up, for trying to launch a self-serve ad platform rather than signing a few large clients to manually manage and bring in big money like a typical services company. They tell us self-serve has failed many times in the past because advertisers are high-maintenance and the handholding, especially with SMBs, becomes too expensive. Sure, that was very true in the past and might be somewhat true today, but if everyone is too scared to build these tools the problem will never get solved! You can programmatically educate and programmatically handhold. Businesses are being educated about digital, not just by AdStage, but by the digital world around them. They need a liaison to bring them into the digital world of advertising that spans across many channels and that’s what AdStage is all about. Not everyone at AdStage is a hardcore ad veteran, but that gives us a unique perspective, one that isn’t clouded with preconceptions about what is possible and what is not.”
Here is a breakdown of some of the features that I love about these guys:
Ad creation in AdStage Express. Create a single ad and automatically see previews of that ad as it appears in each of the four networks. Want to make your facebook ad more social? Simply click on the facebook ad preview to fine tune that ad for facebook.
Campaign Creation in AdStage Express. When creating a new campaign in AdStage Express, select each network you would like to advertise on and AdStage will guide you through the setup. When complete, AdStage will automatically deploy your campaign across each of your selected networks simultaneously.
Creation Goals in AdStage Express. AdStage Express allows you to set goals to track your campaign performance across each network. AdStage will track which networks achieve your goals most often to make sure your ad budget is used most efficiently.
Budgeting in AdStage Express. AdStage Express allows you to create a single campaign with a distributed budget across each network. AdStage will analyze your performance and make frequent budget reallocation recommendations to push your budget to the network that performs best.
On behalf of them launching today they are offering the first 50 SEJ readers Free priority access to Adstage Express private Beta. You can signup here! Let me know what you think!
