ADTHINK Entrepreneurs: Q&A with Joseph Galarneau, Founder/CEO of MEZZOBIT
Our first ADTHINK of the year is only one day away on 5/28! Before tomorrow’s event, we wanted to ask our entrepreneurs some questions on how their biggest risks in business paid off, how legacy brands can keep up with this environment meant for a technological future, and what they look most forward to tomorrow. If you haven’t already registered for this prestigious event, you still have time – register here today!
See what Joseph Galarneau, Founder and CEO of MEZZOBIT had to say…
What is the biggest risk your venture has taken to succeed? How has it paid off?
We initially looked at the data control space and felt that tag management was a commodity technology that only solved the most basic issues. Real progress would come when digital enterprises could manage and maximize individual data partner transactions with their customers, something no one else was focusing on.
So we disrupted that vertical by building an enterprise class tag manager comparable to expensive solutions and giving it away for free. By offering our customers high value without significant investment, we also could better understand their data control problems and build advanced tools to solve them. This has worked well, as evidenced by hundreds of sites adopting our free platform and recent deals with the largest digital brands to use our audience control and viewability optimization products.
What’s one way you have made your company stand out within the saturated ad/tech space?
Mezzobit is an enterprise data company that’s tackling an issue endemic to any company with a digital presence: regaining control over customer data and maximizing its value.
We distinguish ourselves by being the first to solve a problem that many feel was either too hard or a lost battle, and empowering digital enterprises to reclaim lost revenue. This goes way beyond ad-tech, but we’ve started in this vertical given our founding team’s deep media experience and having lived through this issue for years. We are now expanding to brand marketers, who have different but equally compelling reasons to control data, and later onward to regulated industries, who need to manage data for compliance purposes.
What can older, legacy brands be doing in terms of technology adoption in order to keep up?
Having worked with the largest media companies as well as start-ups, I think that legacy brands have gotten the religion regarding technology adoption. However, they still approach innovation with a corporate mindset and processes instead of the nimble, experimental posture of smaller companies. It’s not just a matter of improving their ability to detect promising technologies, but also how to quickly engage with external companies to assess their value and then inject salient solutions into operating companies without excessive overhead.
What’s on your radar for 2015? What are some of your company’s goals?
Controlling and maximizing audience data value is such a frontier that there’s no lack of work here. We’re building the Internet’s first data sharing graph that describes the nexus between enterprises and consumers. A major goal is to amp up our data science efforts around mining higher value for our customers from this unique data set. We’ve been bringing on board PhD-level scientists who were former quants, as there’s a parallel between the revolution on Wall Street with algorithmic trading and how Mezzobit is seeking to optimize data relationships.
What are you looking forward to the most at this year’s ADTHINK?
We always love to engage with potential partners and customers regarding what’s keeping them awake at night regarding online data. Hardly a day goes by when we don’t hear about a product or feature idea that scratches an itch we didn’t know about. ADTHINK provides a particularly target-rich environment for this sort of learning.