A rad­i­cal new dimen­sion to online adver­tis­ing sales is open­ing up with the launch of two new prod­ucts from San Mateo based start­up Drawbridge.

Every adver­tis­ing sales man­ag­er, search engine mar­ket­ing spe­cial­ist and busi­ness devel­op­ment man­ag­er knows that ad re-tar­get­ing is the new name of the game in mar­ket­ing.  Everyone’s at it, from Google right through to star­tups like ReTar­geter and AdRoll.  So what sets Draw­bridge apart?

The Holy Grail of adver­tis­ing beckons

Re-tar­get­ing aims to tar­get ads to con­sumers in line with their online search­es or the web­sites they vis­it.  Most re-tar­get­ing firms are turn­ing to the emerg­ing mobile mar­ket, but in real­i­ty they’re actu­al­ly devel­op­ing solu­tions that are siloed to each spe­cif­ic device.  This is where Draw­bridge promis­es real inno­va­tion, offer­ing gen­uine­ly cross-plat­form advertising.

Hailed as the “Holy Grail” of mar­ket­ing by the startup’s founder, Kamak­shi Sivara­makr­ish­nan, cross-plat­form adver­tis­ing is a poten­tial­ly rev­o­lu­tion­ary con­cept.  The two new prod­ucts, Draw­bridge for Cross Device Mar­ket­ing and Draw­bridge for App Mar­ket­ing, help com­pa­nies tar­get and retar­get their poten­tial cus­tomers across sev­er­al device plat­forms.  Basi­cal­ly, Draw­bridge plants cook­ies on the user’s mobile or desk­top brows­er (when per­mis­si­ble) or hooks into their anonymized device iden­ti­fi­er through a unique app.  This lit­tle giz­mo is capa­ble of sift­ing infor­ma­tion like user behav­ior, loca­tion and time of search/webpage access, where­upon it gen­er­ates a prob­a­bilis­tic match.

What this boils down to, Draw­bridge claims, is the abil­i­ty to iden­ti­fy the same web user what­ev­er devices he or she switch­es between.  A retail­er might, say, pro­mote a beau­ty prod­uct sale online.  With Drawbridge’s tech­nol­o­gy, a user who vis­it­ed the sale site but didn’t buy could be re-tar­get­ed with an in-store dis­count vouch­er while she’s on the hoof with her smartphone.

Head­ing for the stratosphere?

And the proof of the pud­ding is already on show.  Since secur­ing $6.5 mil­lion in ven­ture fund­ing back in May, the 24-per­son start­up has matched in excess of 200 mil­lion users, with 4 mil­lion being added to the expand­ing total with every pass­ing day.  Each day, it cycles through 2 bil­lion ad requests.

The two new prod­ucts have been exten­sive­ly test­ed by Draw­bridge over the last twelve months.
It now boasts 60 live cam­paigns on its plat­form and accord­ing to Sivara­makr­ish­nan, adver­tis­ers using the prod­ucts are see­ing more than 300 per­cent ROI.

The adver­tis­ing stratos­phere appears well with­in sight.