Digital media advertising growing with increase in data and devices

October 15th, 2010

Jeff Wood, CEO, AIMatch

By Allan Maurer

RALEIGH, NC – Although it’s only been six months since its founding, aiMatch, whose technology delivers a single solution for publishers to create, forecast, deliver and analyze their online media, is landing customers such as top picture and video sharing site Photobucket. “We didn’t anticipate being this far along in six months,” says aiMatch CEO Jeff Wood.

(For TechJournal South’s profile of aiMatch see: aiMatch ready for digital ad explosion.)

He attributes the company’s early success to its focus on an area of digital advertising with a strong need and the “exponential” growth of digital advertising.

That growth, says Wood, is fueled by both the proliferation of devices on which people access digital media, and the rivers of data they’re creating. After a recessionary pause last year, digital advertising has resumed double digit growth, according to the Internet Advertising Bureau.

“There are so many more ways digital media can be used now,” Wood says, “on iPads, phones, tablet devices.”

On top of that, new ways of using the devices for location-based targeting and through social media, present marketers with challenges, he adds. “The amount of data that can be used to be more effective and the digital media you can use are growing exponentially,” he says. “That creates challenges, but also opportunities for a company like ours.”

Now it’s really taking off

Wood says all the complexity and growth throwing new challenges at aiMatch makes it “Fun to be in the industry right now. It moved fast during the first ten years, but now it has really taken off.”

Essentially, Woods says, aiMatch has taken tools that already exist but previously required using three or four different products and combined them and simplified their use. “That removes the complexity of integrating multiple databases, multiple programs, and different terminology,” he says.

But, he notes, getting a handle on digital media “Is always going to be a moving target. There are so many ways of tracking effectiveness. One company has come up with 100 different buzz factors of things that go viral. We think about the scale of all that every day and how to simply it so it can be used.”

The consumer privacy question

Another factor in the business is the question of consumer privacy. Wood thinks the industry is moving toward self-regulation. He sees large firms, at least, moving toward strong privacy policies and opt-out options. “The industry will be better off if it’s self-regulated,” he says. “The government doesn’t understand our industry and could make mistakes that would hurt the Internet economy.”

Wood does see plenty of activity in the digital media marketing sector. “There seem to be a good amount of companies funded in our industry and a good number of job openings.”

One reason is that it doesn’t take a fortune to start an Internet company these days. “A company can use the latest technology to start and test their ideas in ways that don’t need so much upfront cash,” he says. “We used a lot of those technologies ourselves to avoid the need to take large investments.”

We asked him who the big spenders are in digital media these days.

“Who isn’t spending on digital?” he replied. “Everyone is trying to find their angle to get into online advertising.”

A look at old and new tools at the Internet Summit

Woods is one of more than 100 Internet experts, thought leaders, executives, and entrepreneurs and 1,000 attendees expected at the upcoming Internet Summit in Raleigh, NC, Nov. 17-18.

“I’m going to cover the evolution of online advertising, going back 15 years and walk through the changes, then discuss some of the challenges for the future and how much more complex it is getting and what to do about that. I’ll talk about the tools used in the past and the tools we’re using now that let us handle scale.”

Previoulsy on TJS:

AIMatch founders go from startup to Microsoft to startup