With the median age of TV viewers and newspaper readers steadily rising, advertisers are increasingly turning to the Internet to ensure that their message reaches its intended audience. San Diego startup AdBoom Group is using technology to help digital ads cut through the online clutter. Times of San Diego spoke with company president Beau Hale about the two-year-old company’s latest product, Hashtag Ads.
Why did you introduce Hashtag Ads?
We saw where the future of digital advertising was headed and it was sharply turning away from traditional display advertising. Now with technology like “ad blockers” and just the way that our brains are trained to not pay attention to the right-hand side of a web page, we knew that we had to break through with an innovative way to serve ads that are native. Everyone says that the best kind of advertisement is word of mouth. So, we decided to take that to the digital world with social media as our platform.
What’s unique about this kind of advertising?
It is native. It is real people with real followers giving real endorsements. Social influencers get to pick and choose the content that they want to post on behalf of our advertisers that fit well with their following. The quality is through the roof because these are not your traditional ads and for that reason they are extremely clickable.
How do social influencers benefit?
For the first time they can consistently monetize their following base. They might get approached on and off by brands to post content on their behalf for a flat fee, but Hashtag Ads delivers a consistency of advertisers and content for which they will get paid on a CPC (cost per click) basis.
How do brands and businesses reach their target audiences?
Social influencers who fit an advertiser’s niche will post content, then the advertiser can optimize campaigns by banning publishers whose content doesn’t produce results. We do this by tracking each social influencer’s performance. Hashtag Ads was built with a heavy emphasis on direct response marketing — our specialty — and for that reason it delivers on the advertiser’s expectations.
The product is still in beta. How do you characterize the response so far?
Overwhelming. We have both advertisers and publishers beating down our door to get on the platform. However, we are extremely selective since quality will make or break our business at the end of the day. We are doing our best to accommodate eager social advertisers and influencers while we vet the quality, but it has proven to be challenging. It is certainly better this way than the opposite problem of not having enough interest, so we are very flattered.
Times of San Diego, a startup itself, regularly writes about startups in technology, biotech and other sectors of local business. If you are a startup in the San Diego area and want to tell your story, please contact news@timesofsandiego.com.
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