April 2018 New(s) Ideas Winner
Digital advertising and technology company AdCellerant is upping their game with an all-in-one digital marketing platform for media companies, UI.Marketing. A past Accelerator Pitch winner (2016) for its innovative advertising technology platform, AdCellerant has gone on to achieve great success in the ad tech/digital marketing arena, with a selection of top news media organizations among their clients.
UI.Marketing seeks to streamline marketing/sales and operations at news media organizations, creating efficiencies and helping them to execute customer campaigns simultaneously across multiple platforms.
The UI.Marketing demo offers a glimpse into the platform, how it works and its benefits for users.
We caught up with AdCellerant’s founder & CEO, Brock Berry, to learn more about the platform and how news media can use it to maximize their digital marketing efforts.
What is UI.Marketing?
Media companies are always trying to simplify the sales process, workflow and fulfillment in Digital Marketing Services. UI.Marketing makes that possible for their entire digital agency solution. Now they can onboard, merchandise, train, sell, execute and report Email Marketing, Native Advertising, Paid Search, Organic Search, IP Targeting, Geo-Fencing, Social Media, PreRoll Video, Programmatic TV and Programmatic Streaming through a single platform.
UI.Marketing provides instant sales efficiencies, operational efficiencies and more. Now, sellers can spend more time on sales calls; operations are able to handle the new products in addition to their existing responsibilities; while clients are able to get all of their digital product reporting in one place. This synergy allows the company to grow revenue while reducing costs.
How did the idea for UI.Marketing come about?
I started the company with Shelby Carlson and John Chamberlin. Before AdCellerant, we ran a digital marketing services team for MediaNews Group called AdTaxi. In that business, we hit levels of scale we never dreamed of and as we researched the market for an all-in-one software system designed to help manage our success, we realized one didn’t exist. Although we didn’t realize it at the time, that’s when UI.Marketing was conceived. Several years later I left AdTaxi and started AdCellerant, Shelby and John joined me shortly after, and as we contemplated the future, we realized we still needed an all-in-one system. Idea! UI.Marketing gets invented on a whiteboard, in a shared resources conference room where the only light was a broken lamp sitting in the corner. We didn’t want to repeat the mistakes of our past and we knew UI.Marketing would allow us to avoid that.
What challenges does UI.Marketing help news media organizations to overcome?
UI.Marketing is designed to service the Sales Team, Operations Team and the Client. First, the application helps the sales team overcome the common sales question for Digital Services of, “What do I sell my client from all of these cool new products?” The system contains a recommendation engine that answers that question for the seller and, in minutes, builds a proposal that would normally take hours to create. Second, once the proposal is sold, UI.Marketing makes it possible for a media organization’s operations team to traffic the entire campaign through a single system, vendor and software application.
Everything is in one place, consistent, standardized and simple. This helps the team overcome the daily challenge of doing more volume without more resources. Everything is piped into UI.Marketing’s reporting dashboard, where the media organization and their client can get all of the campaign reporting in one place.
What are some different ways news media organizations can incorporate UI.Marketing into their business?
UI.Marketing can be fully leveraged where the media organization uses all of AdCellerant’s services, or it can be integrated on a smaller basis. Some companies only need the recommendation engine for sales. Other companies only need reporting, while others need an all-encompassing solution.
What has the response to UI.Marketing been like from your news media customers?
We have received overwhelming positive feedback. The sales teams in the field love the applications, the simplicity, the customer support and that everything can be done by one professional team. Overall, we have seen our media partners’ average deal size increase by 20 percent and the average product per deal increase from 1.5 to 2.5 per sale.
What is AdCellerant working on for the future?
Currently, we’re working on releasing a 2.0 of UI.Marketing where the system will be more customizable, scalable, with more reporting integrations and a more modern look and feel. Today the system has a lot in common with AdWords, and we believe the modern marketer needs a box of crayons so they can move more quickly through the application suite. Outside of software, we are also upgrading our programmatic products such as Geo-Fencing, including Point of Interest Attribution and more. Local marketers are becoming more sophisticated and we want to make sure we’re providing our publishing partners with the most advanced technology available.
What do you see as the future of digital advertising? The future of news media?
The future will be an omnichannel approach where the marketer isn’t focused on a budget for social, search, display, etc. The future marketer will simply define their target market, select a media budget and creative requirements, and the ad placement will run across all channels without a thought about the budget by platform. The buy will simply run like water across all of the different platforms and channels, optimizing to whatever message and method piques the target consumer’s interest most.
I think this future is a good thing for news media. News media companies have audiences in every pocket of the Internet and they own some of the most sanitary environments. The future is connecting the audiences in these highly desirable environments to a platform-agnostic ad server.
How can publishers interested in UI.Marketing get started? Does UI.Marketing require any special computer equipment or software for newspapers to use it?
Publishers can reach out to me at brock@adcellerant.com or contact us through our website, www.AdCellerant.com.
UI.Marketing is a web-based software application, which means for the average computer user, all they will need to leverage the system is an Internet connection.
Do you have a great New(s) Idea? Enter your product or service in our contest today – winners are selected and featured monthly, with a grand prize winner who will be selected in December to receive a dedicated eblast and webinar with Alliance news media members! Entries not selected during the month they were submitted are automatically entered for the next month. Click here to learn more.
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Lindsey is Director, Communications at the News/Media Alliance. She has over 15 years of experience working in communications for nonprofits.
