SPEAKER_00: Today's episode of This Week in Startups is brought to you by Walker Corporate Law, a boutique corporate law firm specializing in the representation of entrepreneurs. For more information, visit them at walkercorporatelaw.com. And by Hiscox. Do you have the proper insurance for your startup? Get the right insurance right now with Hiscox. Tailored coverage starting at only $22.50 a month. Visit hiscox.com slash smallbiz to get a quote. And by Amazon Web Services. Get the resources you need to easily get started with AWS Activate, a new global program for startups, including AWS credits, training, developer support, a startup community forum, and special offers from third parties. Learn more and sign up at aws.amazon.com slash activate.

SPEAKER_03: Hey everybody, it's Jason, and this is not a live episode of This Week in Startups. That's right, because I'm up in San Francisco right now for the launch hackathon.

SPEAKER_04: Thousands of developers competing for investment prices from the launch fund and maybe even syndicated over to the old angel list.

SPEAKER_03: In the meantime, Sahil Jain is a VAD stage. He won Best Business at the launch festival last year. I invested in his company. Speaking of investing in companies, and Sahil's a really, really smart cat. He's a real pain in the ass, too. Let me tell you something. As an investor, this guy is constantly hitting me like, hey, we need to do this. We need to do this. I just love an aggressive entrepreneur and a smart one, right? So you can be aggressive and stupid, or you can be smart and not aggressive. But when you flip both those switches up, like aggressive and wants to win, and super smart, I love that.

SPEAKER_04: And that's Sahil from ADD stage. This is going to be a great interview. You're going to love it. Stick with us.

SPEAKER_08: Hey, everybody.

SPEAKER_12: It's Jason Calacanis, and I am here at WeWork Studios in San Francisco.

SPEAKER_04: Thank you so much to my friends at WeWork Golden Gate here in San Francisco. They built me this beautiful studio, and they host me five times a year or so to do interviews here live with a live studio audience. We did Kara Swisher one time. We're doing Steve Jurvetson the next time. So a lot of great stuff going on at WeWork. A lot of my friends, actually. My friend Josh Williams has an office here at WeWork, and I think they charge about 500 bucks a desk. It's super affordable, and they have a great, great space. I enjoy coming here. So on the program today, Sahil Jain is with me. He is the co-founder and the CEO of ADD stage. If you don't remember, ADD stage was one of the two top winners at the launch festival along with Boxbee in 2013, and I was lucky enough with the creation of the launch fund. That's the angel investing fund that the conference has and that I administer on behalf of our limited partners, we were able to invest $100,000 in Sahil's company, ADD stage, which you can see at ADD stage.io. Sahil, welcome to the program.

SPEAKER_15: Thank you for having me. Appreciate it. Good to see you.

SPEAKER_04: It's good to see you. So in March, we met in January or February of 2013, earlier this year. Is it 2013 still? Yes, it is.

SPEAKER_16: Yeah, you're right. Yeah. So, okay.

SPEAKER_04: And so we met, whatever, almost a year ago now. Yeah. And you were building this product, and then you came to the conference, and lo and behold, you were one of the winners. How's life been since the event?

SPEAKER_21: Life's been great. Yeah. You know, well, I mean, that's how I feel right now. Good. Life's been good. So, no, life's been good. I think the team was really excited. Launch was a really good platform for us to kind of show off our very first product, you know, what we were trying to get out there early. We started the company back in May, and so it was, you know, a nice celebration of all of our work for the first couple months of the company.

SPEAKER_04: Yeah. So, explain to the audience who don't know what AdStage does, what AdStage does, and why you created it. Sure.

SPEAKER_21: Yeah. So, AdStage, at a very high level, is a cross-network ad platform. So, basically, it allows, you know, in-house marketers or in-house teams to build, deploy, and manage ad campaigns across multiple networks from a single interface. So, that includes search, social, mobile, and display advertising across Facebook, LinkedIn, Bing Ads, and Google AdWords.

SPEAKER_12: So, if I was a small business, and I was trying to spend, if I was a plumber, and I wanted

SPEAKER_04: to spend 500 bucks a month to get more customers, or if I was a, you know, small restaurant, and I wanted to get some more people to do catering with my company, I might buy AdWords directly from Google, or I might use Facebook ads, right? You see that when you log into Facebook, there's the little ads link at the bottom. Any consumer can click that. So, why would I, instead of going to that link at the bottom of the page on Facebook, because they seem to have very robust campaign tools there, if anybody's ever touched them, or go to Google AdWords, why would I not just go direct? Why would I use something like AdStage in between?

SPEAKER_21: Yeah. I mean, look, if you're, you know, if you're advertising across just a single network, sure, you may go direct, right? But as soon as you start realizing that, you know, a lot of business, and a lot of businesses should realize this today, that it's important to start to expand your efforts across different networks. You know, like we said at launch, you know, five years ago, all you had to worry about was Google AdWords. But now, as you mentioned, there's Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, you know, Stack Overflow, Retarget, you know, I think Reddit, and a couple others have their self-serve platforms as well. And so, figuring out where to, you know, where to put your money and how much to spend is difficult, and it's important that you diversify your spend. And sure, yeah, the majority might still need to be on Google, but that doesn't mean all of it should be. And so, a tool like ours allows you to very easily experiment with the different networks, that's the whole idea, is to kind of cross-pollinate your spend across these different networks. And even for single networks, I mean, our interface is very normalized. It's supposed to be very simple. It has help everywhere. So, you know, for newer advertisers, even more experienced advertisers, we try to bring contextual help for you all the time to make you a better advertiser. All those tools today just give you tools to build campaigns, but they don't give you tools to necessarily build good campaigns. And that nuance difference is pretty important.

SPEAKER_34: Yeah.

SPEAKER_29: So, and also, aren't the different ad networks better for different businesses? They can be.

SPEAKER_21: It depends, right? I mean, I think that there's a lot of online businesses that can benefit from all the networks. Now, sure, you know, the different networks, you may want to use a different angle. So, in Facebook, you know, you want to use more of a social angle, right? You want it with your ads and your ad creatives.

SPEAKER_38: Who would be an example of that versus Google, which is obviously a search engine primarily? Right.

SPEAKER_21: So, if you think about it, the way that you interact with these ads is how you can kind of realize how you should format them for the different networks. So, in Google, people are searching. There's an actual intent, right? And so, they're actually searching for something. They're searching for a plumber, or they're searching for, you know, a tool to manage their ad campaigns. And so, then they see the ad, and they're like, okay, well, wow, that's a result for me, right? On Facebook, though, you know, it's more people are consuming other types of content. So, trying to make your ads kind of fit into the actual social content is really important.

SPEAKER_26: It sounds really hard, though, on Facebook.

SPEAKER_29: I mean, obviously, on Google, if I'm looking for a plumber, and I type plumber, you know, Los Angeles, it's pretty easy to target that.

SPEAKER_04: But how does a plumber in San Francisco target people in San Francisco when they're looking at pictures of their friends or their Foursquare check-ins, etc.?

SPEAKER_43: Yeah, it's tough. I mean, maybe plumbers shouldn't be on Facebook, right?

SPEAKER_21: But how are they going to know that? They need to experiment. They need to try it out. That's the idea. And so, we're not saying that everybody should be on every single network perpetually. But you should absolutely give it a shot and try out some creative methods to try to beat your competition, right?

SPEAKER_12: Right.

SPEAKER_45: And LinkedIn, you mentioned LinkedIn, you mentioned Bing, and you mentioned Twitter.

SPEAKER_04: How would you describe the state of those networks in terms of for advertisers? Clearly, everybody starts with Google. It seems like Facebook's a good second choice to go to. But that third choice, is it Bing? Is it Twitter? Is it LinkedIn?

SPEAKER_21: And how would you advise people? Experiment? Sure. So, we actually don't. Twitter's not integrated into our platform yet. Right. We'll talk about that in the future. Right. But LinkedIn is... Why is that? Twitter's platform is so new? I mean, these APIs are private APIs. So, you have to apply for them. There's a hierarchy that you have to go through. You have to show that you're a good business and they should give you API access, right? Got it. And so, we're in the process of showing that and proving ourselves. We actually are one of four businesses in the world, though, that have LinkedIn ads API. So, it's Adobe, Bezo, Unified, and then Little Us, AdSage, right? But when it comes to the other networks... So, yeah, Google and Facebook is probably the most typical duo that we see. That being said, it's really a shame that people don't try out Bing, right? Bing is... Because there's low volume of advertisers, a lower volume of advertisers on Bing, it actually performs incredibly well. In fact, Bing performs better for us, for our own campaigns, than Google does at a lower volume.

SPEAKER_26: So, you can spend less money, get more customers. Totally. Yeah.

David Friedberg: So, hey, show me how it works here. Yeah. So, this is actually... So, we launched... For those of you listening on the audio portion, I'll describe for you what's happening. Yeah.

SPEAKER_56: So, you describe what you're doing. Totally.

SPEAKER_21: So, just to kind of give you guys a recap, I mean, the first product that we launched at your conference, at launch, was actually called AdSage Express. And that was for the smaller advertisers. It allowed you to simultaneously build and deploy a campaign across multiple networks.

SPEAKER_29: And when you say a campaign, for somebody who doesn't know what a campaign, explain what that means in plain language.

SPEAKER_21: Yeah, an ad campaign, which includes things like your ad creatives, right? So, your ad creatives, you're targeting. So, who are you targeting this campaign to? You know, is it male versus female? Are you targeting certain age demographics, certain locations? Right. And then, of course, you have keywords, which are kind of the trigger words, right? So, you know, those ads, in layman's terms, when you're searching Google for a plumber, a plumber is a keyword. And it'll trigger certain ads that, you know, those campaigns are having plumber as a keyword being run for them. Right.

SPEAKER_60: Or you might also have, like, sewage block or something as a keyword. Right. Totally.

SPEAKER_04: And then, the creative, so you have the targeting, male, female, age, location, I guess. Then, you have the keywords. Which is part of targeting, yeah.

SPEAKER_12: Which is part of targeting, I guess, that big umbrella of targeting. And then, you also mentioned the creative. The creative is what?

SPEAKER_21: So, the creative is the ad. It's what people see, right? And so, it could be, you know, there's different types of creatives for all these different networks, right? And Google has, they have image ads. So, they're just big images, different sizes. There's about 15, 20 different sizes.

SPEAKER_63: But you don't see those image ads on the search results. It's only text.

SPEAKER_21: There's, you know, they have text ads on the right-hand side. They also have these new types of ads called PLAs, which are product listing advertisements. And those actually do have an image thumbnail, right? So, if you type in Razor Scooter on Google, you'll actually see those pop up and populate. And then, of course, Google has their display network. So, when you go to other websites that have Google Ads on their pages, you'll actually see those image ads on those sites.

SPEAKER_29: Why do you think it is that Google doesn't do display ads on their site, but they put them on other people's sites?

SPEAKER_66: I don't know.

SPEAKER_21: I mean... I think that, you know, I think the form... Well, okay. So, I do think... I mean, I think the format, it's really about... You just don't want to slap ads everywhere, necessarily, right? I mean... It looks ugly. Yeah. It looks bad. And it doesn't, like, it doesn't fit in to what the Google search results are supposed to be. We're supposed to be very quick links to what you want right away, right? And so, I think that's probably one reason. Right. I think there's a slew of other reasons. I'm sure they have. Yeah. They probably just don't want to make their site look ugly, and they don't mind making

SPEAKER_26: other people... It's possible. Do you advise people to make image-based ads? Absolutely.

SPEAKER_21: Or do you think text-based ads are better? No, no. Absolutely. I mean, look, I think image ads are a little bit harder to create, because you have to create that actual creative, right? And that actual asset. But if you can get them, why not? Because it spans so many different... This huge network, the Google Display Network, which is massive. It's across so many different sites that you can capture it. And you can say which placement you want to put it on. So, what types of sites you want to put them on. And so, you can capture a lot more users that way. And plus, image ads are just a little bit more intriguing, right? So, they're going to hopefully, unless they're a little bit bizarre as well, they get you to click.

SPEAKER_75: So, I create the creative. Let's do that right now, I guess. Yeah, well, so what I'll show you right now.

SPEAKER_21: So, we just actually launched this brand new... Well, we announced the launch of this brand new platform product last week in New York at Adweek. And so, this is kind of the next step. This is what we've been working on for the last five months after the launch of our first product. And so, the first step is the user actually comes to account creation. And here, they link their various ad accounts. So, out of Google AdWords, Bing Ads, LinkedIn, and Facebook. And they simply add the account credentials. They hit save and verify. They verify these accounts. So, this means they've already gone to those sites and created an ad network. They have to do that. They have to do that, right? They have to do that step. And so, here, as soon as they click verified, this is new for this platform, we start importing their existing data. So, if they have any campaigns already running in their networks, if they have any historical campaigns, we bring all of that stuff right into AdStage for you. Right. So, you have everything in a single place. Yeah? The second step is filling out your advertising profile. So, here, you give us a little bit of information about yourself. You put in your URL for your site if you have one. You put in a brief description and a minimum of about 10 keywords. Yeah. This basic information actually helps us give what we call pre-flight recommendations. So, now, when you're building a new ad campaign, we'll show you ads from similar and competitive companies. We'll show you recommendations. Actually, this is a lot of what we showed on stage at launch. And after you finish this, everything gets imported into these beautiful dashboards and you get taken to the global dashboard.

SPEAKER_12: And a person like Google or LinkedIn, they're not going to create a global dashboard because

SPEAKER_35: they don't want you to be comparing the effectiveness of their ad network to the others, correct? No, I mean, no, I don't actually, you know, that's exactly what we've done, right? No, I'm saying, but why would Google not create ad stage or Bing not create ad stage?

SPEAKER_29: Yeah, exactly, exactly. They really don't want consumers looking at, like, the Bing effectiveness is three times better than Google or vice versa.

SPEAKER_21: I mean, it's a shame, right? I mean, obviously, for the, you know, for the advertisers, they should, again, they should be diverse to find their spend, but Google wants them to spend everything on their site, right? And so, yeah, they wouldn't do that. I mean, that's why you need a truly platform agnostic solution to make it happen. So here we are at your global dashboard, and this is where you can see all of your data across the various networks that you've linked import into a single place, right? And so there's a lot of segmenting here. You can see how the different networks are, you know, performing over different time periods, so on and so forth. This will redraw. Then you see, you know, your compare metrics graph. You can, of course, you know, draw and compare two different metrics. There's a lot of data here so that you can actually kind of slice it however you'd like to, and you can figure out which channel should you focus on a little bit more, right? Got it. Or how these different prongs are doing. Here are your top 10 performing campaigns. Here's your spend versus your budget. So are you always, you know, are you always surpassing your budget? Should you add a little bit more spend to it? Things like that. And of course, here are your ads. And so here are some of your ads. These are your top 10 ads that we've pulled from all your campaigns. And we show you things like if the ad's been approved or if it's been denied and for what reason has it been denied. And you can actually pivot this open and see the actual ad. So there's your ad unit. There's a copy behind the ad unit. And so next, you know, what a user would want to do is when they're actually coming into this dashboard, these aren't read-only dashboards. So this page is probably more read-only. But you can actually manage everything from this single platform. So here, you can actually see the list of all of your campaigns on the right-hand side. We also have created this thing called a folder. So you can actually throw campaigns from different networks into a folder and essentially give them a shared budget, right? And then our algorithm actually figures out which network is actually performing better and will shift more of your budget into it. And so here, we have a folder called AdStage Platform. It has a bunch of campaigns into it. And we'll actually go into the folder. And now a folder-level dashboard will start being generated. So you can see that happen right here. And so these are all the campaigns within the folder. It's a higher level of abstraction. So it's really nice to be able to manage things from a higher level. You can see all the ads within this folder as well. And so it's actually pretty cool. So I don't need to drill down into each separate campaign. Here are all of my ads from every campaign within this folder.

SPEAKER_83: All right. When we get back from the commercial break, I want to talk a little bit about video ads because that seems to be all the rage right now.

SPEAKER_29: And then maybe if you have some plans there or some advice around video ads when we get back from this important commercial message.

SPEAKER_04: Ah, yes. Thank you, Scott Walker at the Walker Corporate Law Group for supporting This Week in Startups, all of our events, and most importantly, the startups that are around our This Week in Startups ecosystem. Scott's a great guy. And he runs a boutique law firm specializing in the representation of entrepreneurs and startups. He encourages fixed fees. That's right, fixed fees so you don't get those crazy billable hours that reward inefficiency. I agree with you, Scott Walker. Fixed fees are the way to go for startups. And all of his attorneys have 10, 20 years experience or more. And none of these junior associates getting on-the-job training with your startup. No, no, no, no, no, no. You're going to get a great attorney and you're going to get a great fair price. Additional services include mergers and acquisitions, licensing, agreements, terms of services, privacy policies, all that great stuff. And if you want to talk to the founder, you can do so at any time. That's right, founder to founder discussions. Scott Walker can be reached directly at 415-979-9998.

SPEAKER_03: 415, that's the San Francisco area code. 979-9998. 979-9998. Scott at walkercorporatelaw.com is his email.

SPEAKER_04: Scott at walkercorporatelaw.com is his email. Or you can visit walkercorporatelaw.com. Let's all take a moment to thank and follow at ScottEdWalker on Twitter. Thank you, Scott. It's really been great to get to know you over the years and have your support for this week in startups.

SPEAKER_87: On behalf of the startups that you represent and the ones who listen to this program, I salute you, Scott. Okay, let's get back to the program.

SPEAKER_04: All right. Thank you to our partners, our sponsors. I don't know. It's like all this is native advertising. Now, I call the people who are advertisers on a program the partners.

SPEAKER_12: It sounds better than just advertisers. Right. What do you think of all this native advertising stuff going on? It seems to be all the rage right now.

SPEAKER_04: Of course, it's not the majority of the spend, but it is the majority of what people are buzzing about. How do you look at native advertising?

SPEAKER_21: Look, I think it's interesting. I think that it's kind of like the evolution of direct buys, right? So they're a little bit more kind of ingrained experiences and they're very set up for the different use cases. I think I was recently at Adweek. There was a really interesting talk. And the guy who runs marketing, I forgot his name, at BuzzFeed was talking about how he believes every site essentially or every offering should have its own ad units, right? Its own native ad units because that fits into the stream, right? And a lot of times now you see these ads that are kind of out of place because they haven't really like Google AdSense ads, right? They haven't been designed to fit into the product.

SPEAKER_47: And so Facebook's actually doing a really good job of this. You can't tell the ads from the content. Exactly.

SPEAKER_29: Now, is that running the risk of being deceptive?

SPEAKER_04: I know the FTC has now said, hey, we're checking out advertising on all the social networks and they did it with bloggers previously. There's a little bit of an issue around consumers not knowing what's an ad and what is, correct?

SPEAKER_95: Yeah.

SPEAKER_96: Yeah, I think so.

SPEAKER_12: How should the industry handle that?

SPEAKER_96: Well.

SPEAKER_12: Because if you're saying the gold standard is to make it fit in the stream, that's another way of saying it doesn't feel like an ad, which is another way of saying maybe people are confused.

SPEAKER_26: I mean, there's a fine line here. Well, what does it matter?

SPEAKER_21: If the ad's really good and it's compelling and it's good content that you actually want to engage with, what does it matter? Does it matter if the consumer knows it's an ad? I don't know. I'm not really sure yet because it's really changing, right? So I think that a lot of ads are becoming more content-focused, right? And so it's maybe an ad to a really interesting video that you'd actually really enjoy watching. In that case, are you upset with it? It's only the time in which consumers get really upset when ads suck. And granted, I don't think we're there yet. I think that ads still suck.

SPEAKER_35: Well, I think if you don't know it's an ad, that would also make me pissed off. But maybe this younger generation doesn't care as much. Do you think there's a generational thing going on right now? Might be. I mean, I don't really mind. Again, if I go to it. You don't mind if you see an ad and you don't know it's an ad? Like if you see content and you don't know it's an ad, that they were paid for it? I don't mind.

SPEAKER_106: Really? I mean, what's the harm?

SPEAKER_107: Well, because you'd be deceived.

SPEAKER_108: Like let's say the car kind of sucks, but they gave you the car and said, hey, drive this car. And they paid the journalist to write a good review about it. And it's a good review of a bad car and you buy it.

SPEAKER_21: And then you're like, oh, it kind of got suckered. Well, that's a little bit different though. Right. Like I think that if I were to actually click on this given ad and then it takes me to something totally random that's absolutely not relevant, then I get upset.

SPEAKER_26: Well, that speaks to the randomness of it.

SPEAKER_108: But what I'm talking about is like BuzzFeed does the top 12 reasons why you need an Xbox. But it's Xbox's content and you don't know.

SPEAKER_21: But if it's good content and I like Xbox, I'm engaged. What if you buy the Xbox and it turns out it sucks? Well, I bought the Xbox because the content encouraged me to buy it. It's just content that anybody else is...

SPEAKER_113: Yeah, see, I think the deceptive thing, I mean, there's laws against that. I mean, you can't really not say it's an ad.

SPEAKER_21: Yeah, I know. And I think Twitter, you know, Twitter actually talked about this recently, right? Yeah. So now they're having to mark everything and be very clear that it's an actual ad. Right. Look, I just...

SPEAKER_84: They say promoted, I guess, is their word.

SPEAKER_21: Right, right. So maybe I just don't worry about it. Yeah. But, you know, I think it's an interesting concept. I think truly what's actually, kind of to take it back a little bit, what's really interesting about this whole notion is what is an ad lately? Right. Right? We're going back to the crux, the kind of foundation of what really is an ad these days. And I think that's more interesting to me. Which is what? Is it content or is it just text or is it providing value? Yeah, it's all those things. I think we're seeing ads in very different ways. I think, you know, ads, again, slowly. If, you know, I think consumers in general will be a lot less upset with ads when we get to the day. And I don't know if we'll ever get there. I think we will. Where they actually see ads or whatever it is, promoted content, whatever you want to call it, of things they actually want to see. Right? Right. And once that's perfect, and who knows if we'll get there, I think we've been striving to get there for a very long time. But once that happens, then are you really upset with it? I mean, if I...

SPEAKER_117: No, I mean, I love targeted ads. It can get a little creepy with this retargeting.

SPEAKER_29: It can. How does retargeting work for people in the audience who don't know? Because that seems to be one that's making people think they're being super, super surveilled and tracked, which in a way they are.

SPEAKER_108: They are. But what is retargeting and should people be worried about it?

SPEAKER_21: So what is retargeting? So retargeting, basically, when you go to a site, they have a pixel on the site. And so as soon as you hit the site, you as a user get cookied. So there's this digital kind of tag that gets put onto the user.

SPEAKER_120: You're fingerprinted.

SPEAKER_21: Right, exactly.

SPEAKER_120: Put in a database somewhere.

SPEAKER_21: Right, exactly. Now you're making it sound very creepy. Exactly. And the words we use matter, right? Right. And so now, you know, when this user is traveling, it's just like tagging a shark. And so now when this user is going around to different sites, that, you know, the actual originator of the cookie, so the site that they hit initially, then knows where they are and can serve ads to that given user. Because they knew that that user hit the site, maybe didn't convert, right? In most cases, did not convert. And they said, okay, well, there was some interest. They came to my site for a reason. I want to have a couple more shots at trying to get them to convert, right? That's retargeting.

SPEAKER_29: And so who owns the retargeting database, as it were? So if I am BuzzFeed and I target, this is an Xbox user because they read an Xbox story. And now Xbox wants to target them on Yahoo. How does that actually occur?

SPEAKER_35: Because it's BuzzFeed's database that has it or it's?

SPEAKER_21: Yeah, so BuzzFeed, I mean, it's their pixel that they put on the site, right? It depends, right? It depends on if you're, you know, if you're a company like Retargeter who's doing, who's giving these services out for retargeting or AdRoll or FBX, Facebook Exchange. You're putting the FBX pixel on your site. And so the data is kind of shared in that case. You know, if I'm the site that I'm putting the pixel on my site, I have some of that data, right? And so, and then I have my ad server where I store all my creatives to then shoot out at people that have been, you know, who've been tagged, so to speak. But then, of course, Facebook is getting that data, too, if I'm using the FBX pixel. Right. Right, so.

David Friedberg: And that is, does that exist in the form of the like button? That's, yeah, that's one way.

SPEAKER_130: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, when you engage in that. So all those like buttons from Facebook.

SPEAKER_04: Oh, yeah. Are basically Facebook's way of building psychographic profiles of everybody on the planet.

David Friedberg: Yeah, those are the various nodes. How much do they know? They know a lot.

SPEAKER_26: What could you target through Facebook via this like button? I mean, yeah, think about it.

SPEAKER_21: Like, so far, and they haven't even unlocked the full potential. I mean, and that's scary. But, you know, right now you can target by interests, by likes. You can actually target by various likes that they have on Facebook. You can target, you know, age and gender were just the first step because you have to put in your age. You have to put in your gender when you set out, you know, when you put up a Facebook page. Right. And so now they have your interests. They have the things that you like. They then group people in the social graph into these things called broad categories. So maybe soccer is a broad category. Right. And now they're also starting to tie in offline conversion tracking with, you know, other companies, I think, in multi-touch attribution, which is another interesting topic. Companies like, I think, DataLogix and Axiom. What does that mean? Multi-touch attribution. Yeah, so that's actually...

SPEAKER_133: Attribution.

SPEAKER_21: Yeah, so that's a really interesting... Yeah, sorry, big jargon. MTA. Multi-touch attribution. Right. I don't even know that one. Multi-touch attribution is fascinating. So basically, you know, users don't necessarily convert on the first ad they see, right? Got it. So I may see ad A on Facebook. For what? For, let's say it's for AdStage. I see an ad for AdStage on Facebook. But I'm like, hmm, I don't really, you know, I saw it. It's interesting. Yeah, maybe I need it. Maybe I don't. Yeah, maybe I don't need it. And so then I go to Google, and now I'm typing in cross-network ad platform, right? And I see the ad for AdStage again. And then I'm like, okay, now I want to click and check it out. And I want to actually convert. So then they go, and so who actually gets the credit for that click? Because Facebook claims that they played a role in that actual click, right? You didn't click, but they may have... They influenced the user a little bit. They created some kind of familiarity, right? And for that reason, they lowered the barrier, right? And so that was a multi-touch event where, you know, Facebook had the first touch, Google had another touch, and then the conversion happened. And right now, it's the person who gets the click is the one who benefits. Well, yeah. So it depends on the type of attribution model that you're using. That model that you just mentioned is called last click attribution. So whoever was the last click event, that person gets the actual... Exactly. They get the credit, right?

SPEAKER_04: Does that mean people are building services around getting the last click? Like, maybe eHouse, you know, design like, you know, how to... They write a bad article on how to change your oil, and it doesn't really answer the question. So then they have people who change oil at the end. They get the last click. But, you know, other people like Google or Facebook, people see the how to change oil website and don't click it.

SPEAKER_21: Yeah. I mean, people are, you know... Well, so a lot of folks are trying to combat this by building multi-touch attribution tools, right? And so a lot of companies like ours at AdStage, we should have multi-touch attribution within our tool. It's good because it shows advertisers, you know, who should really get the credit, right? You want to have a last click... You don't want to just have a last click attribution model. You want to see that funnel as much as you can. Like, currently, we're going to launch with our first version of it, and it's just going to be assists. So we can actually give, you know, if multiple networks played a role in, you know, the Google ad converting, we'll show assists for the other networks as well.

SPEAKER_147: Ah. So if you saw the ad for the new Volvo on Yahoo, and then you saw it on BuzzFeed, then you saw

SPEAKER_04: it on Gawker, and then you clicked on it when you were reading the Atlantic Wire, those

SPEAKER_108: three, and it was a, you know, whatever, $2 click, how would you split that between the four players?

SPEAKER_21: And that's the tough part, right? So it depends. So some people give, you know, they'll give, they'll equally distribute the actual... Really? I mean, it's all, that's what people are trying to figure out. No one's, this is, you know, this is not necessarily a new notion, but people are really trying to figure out how they should actually distribute this now. Interesting. And so some people do, they think, okay, well, last click should still get, you know, 50%, and the rest can be, the other 50% can be distributed between the other three, right? Right.

SPEAKER_29: So giving impressions, but then doesn't that incentivize people to not be effective in their click-through rate, or does it incentivize them to be more effective? Because then you can be like, oh, I'll just throw the ads on the side, I know I'm going to get something for throwing them over there.

SPEAKER_21: Yeah. I mean, well, if last click gets the most, you know, gets the most, let's say, credit, then you do want to still make them effective, right? Yeah. If it's equally shared, I mean, you still want to make them effective, because, you know, look, I think that you should definitely give, I personally, so far, I think you should give the last click a little bit more. Of course. It makes total sense, yeah. Yeah. And so in that case, it's still driving the right behavior, I think.

SPEAKER_38: Who's driving this, you know, multi- Multi-touch attribution. Touch attribution.

SPEAKER_26: Oh, there's a lot of folks. I mean, Facebook's been a big proponent of it. They're, they don't actually do- That's because they're the least effective, and Google's is the most.

SPEAKER_35: I'm not going to comment. No, everybody knows Facebook has the worst click-through rate.

SPEAKER_12: But- So Facebook doesn't get a lot of clicks. I mean, it's because it's, you explained earlier, it's a social network.

SPEAKER_35: It doesn't really work for the plumber, because nobody's typing in plumber into Facebook. Plumber's a really hard example, though. I mean, I think that- Well, I mean, even if you're buying a car, right, like, isn't Google much more effective

SPEAKER_160: for advertising.

SPEAKER_21: That's a really broad statement. I don't know if, you can't say that across the board. That's too general of a statement. Because, look, I, that's why Facebook, yeah, I mean, that's why Facebook's like something, we know that this has got to work in some way, we think, right? And so multi-touch might be the key to this. I don't know if they're actually- I think there may, I'll be honest, I'm a little bit of a cynic on this.

SPEAKER_04: I think that Google has such an, they're so effective. Yeah. Because people, like you said earlier, have intentionality. They have direct intent.

SPEAKER_162: When you type in a search for a Volvo, we know you want a Volvo. Well, on Facebook, nobody's there to, they don't have any intent other than to waste time or, like, you know, look at family members' photos. So I think it's a flaw in Facebook's ad network.

SPEAKER_108: I mean, they have all that great data, but nobody has intent in that system. So I think that's a desperate move on their part to try to cut themselves into the revenue

SPEAKER_35: stream. So you're right.

SPEAKER_21: That's a very cynical view. Yes. I think that, look, check this out, though. This is interesting. So on Facebook- Well, tell me how they would respond to it. Well, so there's a couple of different ways that they're trying to mitigate it. I mean, the other benefit about, you know, it being a social network is on the ad, you can show your friends who have also liked the similar ad or the similar service. That's interesting. That actually now increases my intent to click on that ad very, you know, to a pretty large extent.

David Friedberg: No, when I see that, I think, wow, Robert Scoble liked this phone. Right. Maybe I'll like that phone. And Google doesn't do that. Yeah. So that's actually a very interesting way to make it happen.

SPEAKER_29: And they have the rights to do that now, right? They rewrote their terms of service to say, if you use Facebook, we can use you in ads.

SPEAKER_43: Yeah. I mean, it's not written just like that, but yeah, it's similar.

SPEAKER_29: Because I remember they got themselves in a little bit of trouble with the beacon and some of the other products where they were like using people's likenesses in ads, but I guess they wrote their terms of service to, I find that super creepy. To be creative. That's why I undid every like I have on Facebook. Yeah. I mean, I really don't use Facebook that often, but I stopped liking stuff and I use disconnect.me and ad blockers to take off, not ads, but to take off the Facebook buttons

SPEAKER_167: because I don't want them tracking me. I use incognito and VPNs and everything. I don't want to be tracked.

SPEAKER_148: So I'm actually really curious. Why is that so creepy?

SPEAKER_21: So I agree that it can be very creepy in some ways, but what's the harm?

SPEAKER_29: Being an IT guy previously, when I was in my early 20s, I used to install databases and networks, Lotus Notes, this kind of stuff.

SPEAKER_04: And I saw over and over again that the people who manage the networks were all sniffing on it, were all looking at the data, and that there was really no privacy. It was a bit of an illusion. And so it's my belief that the people at Facebook or Google, the rank and file people at the NSA, I think they're all looking at the data. I think it's all compromised. And you see this. There's been almost a dozen people at the NSA who've been charged with stalking girls and women, girlfriends, previous stuff, love interest on the NSA databases. There was somebody at Facebook who was creeping on previous girlfriends a couple of years back. And they may have built tools to try to avoid this. And at Google, I think they had similar problems where people were looking into people's accounts. So I think that all this stuff gets compromised. And I think that they actually, there's people in the system who are going, hey, look, this person was typing in searches for this disease. So, oh, this person has AIDS. This person has depression. This person has whatever disease it might be. Right. Or this person is interested in this craziness or whatever. I really think the privacy issues are paramount. And I don't think that the industry has done a great job of ensuring that that stuff's encrypted and I think they don't, they shouldn't be even storing it. You know, I think Google stores, searches for 18 months or something crazy. And this tracking is just over the top. I think the tracking needs to be rolled back and opt in as opposed to how hard it is to opt out. Right. But I sympathize with people trying to make a business out of advertising. Right. So I think there's some balance that has to occur.

SPEAKER_21: There's got to be, I think there's a balance. I think there's a balance. And I think that increasingly so with all the security concerns for individuals, rightfully so. Yeah. I think that we will get pushed into a new era of how we can actually handle that. And, you know, we'll be a little bit more, I think we'll be a little bit more thoughtful in our approach. Right. As advertisers and as business owners, we'll be more thoughtful as well. Sure. And well, you know, I think at the end of the day, the idealist kind of view is let's show people what they really want to see. Right. Right. That's a virtuous thing. I know.

SPEAKER_12: Listen, if I'm searching for, if it's somebody searching for AIDS, I don't know how, or

SPEAKER_04: HIV, I don't know how they feel about seeing HIV ads follow them around the web. Right. Or depression ads. It's private information too. It's very private healthcare information. That's always a good example. Now, if I'm searching for a Volvo or something, or AdStage, or This Week in Startups, I don't care. You know, like that's just flying with me. So I guess it depends. But I asked you, I teased before that I wanted to ask you about video.

SPEAKER_29: The ads on YouTube, these TrueView ads, where people can click to watch the ad or not, the advertisers don't have to pay if the person doesn't watch the video. Right. Beyond whatever it is. I think it's five seconds or ten seconds. I'm not sure exactly. Right. What impact has YouTube's video ads had? Because I see the creative getting much better. And I hear from many people. I saw one startup, Ryan Carson's startup, Treehouse. Yeah, Treehouse. It was doing massive advertising on YouTube. And I heard from an insider it was working phenomenal. What's the impact of TrueView ads and video ads today?

SPEAKER_21: I think it's exactly what you said. It's just getting better. And people are, you know, it's more thoughtful how the approach with pre-roll ads, and you have post-roll ads, and you have mid-roll ads as well. Right. And the content's just getting better. You know, there's a lot of tools out there for you to produce good content. Right. There's a lot of tools out there, so you don't have to just go and, you know, and Photoshop an editor and kind of create these on your own, these really kind of scrappy videos of basically a PowerPoint running, right?

SPEAKER_26: And so people are starting to put that. Oh, I see what you're saying. People are making, like, PowerPoint-like video ads. Yeah, I mean...

SPEAKER_185: Like those cartoony kind of ads? Like, this is my service.

SPEAKER_21: Well, so I'm talking about the old ads used to be, like, a PowerPoint slide, right? Ah, right. The new ads are a little bit higher production value. Gotcha. People have a higher expectation, and it's more intriguing. It's just, like, you know, they're... But, you know, a lot of people still don't like them. I mean, they're still very much commercials. Right. Right. I mean, Hulu, you know, inputs, I think, like, they have about three or so that show up during an hour segment show. Right. And so...

SPEAKER_189: Which is, by the way, a third of, or a fourth of what you'd see watching it on regular TV.

SPEAKER_21: Right. Right. Exactly. Yeah, I mean, it's a lot better than regular TV. Seems like a pretty good deal. Yeah, totally. And that's why a lot of people are turning off regular TV. Right. I haven't had cable for years now. Yeah. Oh, really?

SPEAKER_191: Yeah. How old are you? I'm 23.

SPEAKER_35: You're 23. And do you have any friends in your age group who have cable or satellite TV?

SPEAKER_21: I mean, yeah, definitely, but it's deep. Do the majority not have it? Actually, the majority in my very close group, no. They don't have cable anymore.

SPEAKER_142: What do they do? Do they do Netflix and Hulu? Yeah, they stream.

SPEAKER_21: Do you have a Netflix subscription? I have a Netflix subscription. Right. I stream. I use my Xbox or my PlayStation. I also stream Netflix through that.

SPEAKER_26: Do you have Hulu? Do you have a Hulu premium or no? No, I have a normal. I just use normal. Do you have transmission in BitTorrent? I... No, you don't. No, don't. Let me answer that question for you.

SPEAKER_98: No, you don't use transmission or BitTorrent. But you have friends who might do that. Oh, yeah. It's, like, easier just to, like...

SPEAKER_199: Yeah. I have a friend who's not me, and this friend who's not me, yeah, has five rooms with Direc

SPEAKER_155: TV in his house and pays $150 a month, $1,800 a year for Direc TV.

SPEAKER_162: And sometimes he needs to get an episode of Breaking Bad when he's on the road. Right. And so he downloads it off the BitTorrent.

SPEAKER_204: Interesting. Who's his friend?

SPEAKER_162: Is that person being ethical or non-ethical? If they're spending $1,800 a year, in your mind, on Direc TV, and they once in a while

David Friedberg: have to grab an episode because they can't get it off the Direc TV and DVR.

SPEAKER_21: I mean, by copyright law, they're being unethical. And by distribution law, right? Yeah. And so in content ownership law, and digital rights management. So, yeah, I guess.

SPEAKER_35: But in the court of public opinion, I think it's fine. Well, as a poor entrepreneur, I think it's fine. I just think, like, they make it so hard locking up stuff. Okay, so video ads having a big impact?

SPEAKER_155: Yeah, absolutely. They're growing. How much is it now becoming, like, 10% of Google's overall business?

SPEAKER_21: Video ads? Yeah. It's growing. I don't know if it's 10% just yet, but it's absolutely growing. Just like mobile is growing tremendously.

SPEAKER_04: Yeah, so tell us a little bit, since we have an expert on all these ads, how do mobile ads differ than the web ads?

SPEAKER_29: Because I know every time I open Facebook on my mobile, which is not too often, I get slapped

SPEAKER_03: with a huge honking ad for Intuit or something. Right. That has led to a billion dollars in revenue, a quarter from them that they didn't even

SPEAKER_04: have. But what's the state of mobile advertising?

SPEAKER_29: Is it better than desktop advertising?

SPEAKER_21: Well, look, I think it's more about, I think we have well over a billion devices in our pocket now. We're connected constantly. Our engagement rates with our phones, you know, when you look at your phone and things like that, is very high. And so people, in terms of, for advertisers, it's a goldmine. Yeah. Right? They really want to attract people. They want to get, you know, get into that kind of psyche right when you're on the phone, the device. I do think it's an issue. I think that the mobile ad units currently are very intrusive. And, you know, very frustratingly so, even on Facebook, like you said. Yeah. The first thing I see, I don't even get to see a post from my friend. I see this huge ad right at the top. That's an issue to me. A little bit. Right? So, but granted, I think that mobile advertising is becoming better and is seeing gains because the ad units are becoming better. The targeting is becoming better. Previously, when, you know, when I was working at Yahoo, and this was back in 07, I was 17 at the time, and we were still doing-

SPEAKER_223: You were 17 working at Yahoo? How'd you get back in? Yeah.

SPEAKER_21: I left high school for that.

SPEAKER_47: Yeah.

SPEAKER_21: Dropped out of high school.

SPEAKER_98: You dropped out of high school? You knew this.

SPEAKER_26: I kind of knew this. What, in junior year? After my junior, right after my junior year, yeah.

SPEAKER_35: What happens to your parents when you tell them you're dropping out of high school?

SPEAKER_26: Well, they freak out a little bit.

SPEAKER_225: I mean, if I'm your dad, I might take a swing at you. My dad was an entrepreneur, so that was easy. Oh, okay. My mom freaked out. Really?

SPEAKER_26: Do you have immigrant parents, or are they Americans? Well, they're Americans now, but yeah, they immigrated from India. They immigrated.

SPEAKER_35: They immigrated from India. That kind of matters. Like, would they just absolutely infuriate it? Did your mom go crazy?

SPEAKER_21: Yeah, my mom was a little bit- I mean, they've been very supporting this entire time. Well, now you've raised a bunch of money and millions of dollars and won the launch

SPEAKER_230: conference.

SPEAKER_21: Look, I dropped out of Berkeley, too. I dropped out of college, too, so I freaked them out twice. No, my mom is obviously freaking out a little bit. Yeah. She still wants me to go back to school and so on and so forth. My dad was- he trusts me. They trust me. They've raised three good kids. They have good heads on their shoulders. If I was a drug addict and I didn't know what I was doing, they'd be even more worried. Right. But I think they were like, okay, he's not an idiot. Maybe we'll see. And so we'll give them a chance. So they gave me a chance and I ran with it. So that's cool. But yeah, but back to the mobile side.

SPEAKER_83: All right. When we get back, we'll talk about mobile. Okay, that sounds good. We'll take a quick break, pause for the cause, and hear this great partner message.

SPEAKER_04: Hey, Hiscox offers customized coverage and competitive pricing on small business insurance, and I'm excited to tell you about the launch of the Hiscox Reactor. It's an online experience that takes you through a personalized virtual career journey, all powered by the details of your LinkedIn profile. It's really cool. The Hiscox Reactor becomes a digital storybook, shedding light on what may happen in the future based on your past decisions. Every action has a reaction, and those actions can lead to business success or business failure. At the end of the journey, you'll see an image of yourself on the cover of Fast Company Magazine giving you insight into how it would look if you were named Hiscox Business Owner of the Year. And there you can see me, Jason Calacanis, on the cover of Fast Company Magazine. Hey, why the hell haven't I been on the cover of Fast Company Magazine yet? The Hiscox Reactor virtual experience is supported by the resource page that provides useful tips and advice based on your specific industry. Visit reactor.hiscoxusa. Yes, visit reactor.hiscoxusa. Thank you, Hiscox Small Biz. Let's get back to the program. Okay, we're back. We were talking about mobile with Sahil Jane from AdStage.io. Go check it out. And you guys have at AdStage on Twitter?

SPEAKER_235: At GetAdStage.

SPEAKER_04: At GetAdStage, the little hacker trick. Put Get in front of the name of your company and you can get your Twitter handle. And so go check that out. We were talking about mobile ads. How are they better than desktop?

SPEAKER_237: Are there specific advantages? I guess location being one of them.

SPEAKER_21: Yeah, you can target by location. So yeah, geolocation is actually very cool. You can do a lot of these geofencing kind of tricks. So you walk into Safeway and Safeway has a geofence set up around their actual perimeter. So as soon as you walk in.

SPEAKER_240: What does that mean, geofence? How does it technically work?

SPEAKER_21: So geofence, essentially, you set up XYZ coordinates of a given location. And you'll say, they use a Google Maps API or whatever, and they can come up with it. And they can say, this location has now a virtual fence around it. So as soon as you go through this fence, you've now triggered it. And once you've triggered it, Safeway's like, oh, shoot, someone's in my geofence. I can start doing push notifications. It's one of the actions, right? Right. Or say, hey, you know the coupons you used to pull out in Safeway a long time ago? Yeah, like on the wall. They can just send that right to your phone. If you have the Safeway app. Yeah, if you have the Safeway app or whatever app that Safeway's integrated into.

SPEAKER_12: That's why none of us have really experienced this. Right. But what's the more pragmatic thing? If I take out Facebook, does Facebook geofence or Google, if I do a Google search, will I see it?

SPEAKER_21: I actually, I mean, they should. Yeah. I'm not sure if they do yet. I don't know if I've, yeah, I don't know if I've, I don't get out too much.

SPEAKER_04: And what about Apple's role in advertising? Let me ask you about that because they made a whole big deal about they're going to have these Apple iAds and then it turned out to be a bit of a disaster.

SPEAKER_21: They didn't work very well. Well, think about it. I mean, what was the ad image? It was a freaking banner at the bottom of your screen or the top of your screen. Banner ads on mobile are not good. That's like the old school. They're not good on the web, right? Exactly. I mean, banner ads are slowly, thankfully, going away. They're not very good. They're not engaging. They're not content. You know, people talk about this. And so now the new type of Facebook ads that are actually becoming more and more interesting, the Facebook mobile ads, they're becoming more and more interesting, are more targeted. They're more relevant. They're more interesting. They have a larger image so I can engage with that image. That makes sense to me. I see a picture of the actual app, right? And the banner ads, they had all these weird, funky flash things happening and they're trying to show you a cursor actually clicking on the button and you're not actually clicking on the button, right? And so, and those were very deceptive, by the way. And so, you know, I think that those, these types of ad units are getting a little bit more ingrained in your actual kind of usage. And as soon as, you know, as long as they still show me stuff I like, that's good. Now, granted, there was a couple months there when Facebook just started with the mobile install ads and I can't tell you how many times I saw the same ad over and over and over again. And that's an issue called frequency, which is, you know, the number of like on average, if you have a, you know, 3.0 frequency, that means on average, the user sees the same ad at least three times before they click, right? So that's your average frequency. The higher the frequency, the worse. And you get into what they call ad fatigue very quickly.

SPEAKER_251: Yeah, you're just annoyed too.

SPEAKER_29: Let's talk about LinkedIn. I recently tried LinkedIn advertising to try to get people to launch mobile and wearables

SPEAKER_04: conference, spent probably a thousand bucks, didn't work. And it was a bit of a disaster to be honest. I mean, I don't mean to be mean towards LinkedIn or anything like that, but it was $2 a click or I don't know, $50 CPM. It was ridiculously high and really no performance.

SPEAKER_29: I mean, maybe we had, maybe it's hard to sell conference tickets, but who's using it?

SPEAKER_155: And is that platform, you know, really competitive today or they have a long way to go? What do you think of LinkedIn ads?

SPEAKER_21: Well, I think they definitely, just like Facebook has a long way to go, they definitely have a long way to go. I'm actually very bullish on LinkedIn ads. Okay, why? That's why, because they're incredibly targeted. I mean, you can, there's so many awesome targeting parameters. I can know, you know, I can target by education level. I can target by job title, right? So if I'm a B2B business, so by the way, it works very well for B2B businesses. That's kind of the more, B2B advertising does very well in LinkedIn.

SPEAKER_26: So that, which it was for us, which are a conference. So you're saying maybe we didn't set up the campaign, right? It's possible. Yeah, absolutely. It's possible.

SPEAKER_21: And in that case, that's where they have a way to go, right? They need to have more help. They need to have more support. They need to kind of foster that.

SPEAKER_162: So maybe I should have done like mobile in your title or wireless in your title.

SPEAKER_21: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Right. That would have helped. So if you can, you can target by title, you can target by workplace and companies, you could target various mobile companies as well, or wearable companies. So I could do ads to people at Google. Yeah. Yeah, you can target companies. And that's actually incredibly powerful. That's why I like LinkedIn. And there's some companies that are doing very well on LinkedIn, by the way. What type of companies? Do you have examples? So actually one, which is not really a hardcore B2B, not a B2B company, is Jack Threads. Jack Threads spends a lot of money. What is that, Jack Threads? Clothing. Oh, gotcha. It's an e-commerce company. And they, you know, boat shoes and things like that. Gotcha. Some of the hipster stuff. And so they do a lot of stuff on LinkedIn, and they actually seem to be doing quite well. Another company, actually, one of our customers, New Relic, right? Of course. New Relic's a sponsor of this program. Yeah.

SPEAKER_31: They do a lot on LinkedIn, and they're doing pretty well on LinkedIn.

SPEAKER_147: And in both of those cases, I mean, with New Relic and with the clothing company, you're

SPEAKER_29: talking about products that cost, you know, a decent amount of money. Yeah. So they can probably get the conversion funnel, as it were, going net positive.

SPEAKER_21: Net positive. Right. Yeah, ideally. I mean, I think, you know, it is a more expensive network, and I think they're working on it. I think they have...

SPEAKER_155: Why did they set the clicks up at $2? I mean, it just sounds ridiculous as a minimum. What's the minimum on Facebook or Google?

SPEAKER_21: It's different. So it's... Yeah, $0.05, $0.10? Yeah, it's like, it's something incredibly low. Right. Although you'd never be able to really get anything with that. You still would have to go above about $1 or something like that. Well, it depends. It really depends on every single different vertical you're targeting. It all changes. Yeah. And on LinkedIn, it changes as well, too, as like the minimum. But they definitely change their recommendations above that. And so it's the competition. It's the volume. There's lower volume. And that means that if someone's spending a lot, right, and they're bidding very, very

SPEAKER_246: high, they knock up the price in the auction, right? And so that's why you're seeing higher numbers.

SPEAKER_22: What do you think of this Facebook doing, like, pay for your likes twice thing, where

SPEAKER_04: like, people would go on Facebook, and they would buy likes, or the opportunity to get people to like their, you know, let's say... The page.

SPEAKER_29: Yeah, they like their page, and it's a local bar. So this local bar spends, you know, $1,000 getting whatever it is, 5,000 likes for their page.

SPEAKER_04: Then they want to promote a post to their followers, and they make you pay a second time to reach all of them. People were kind of upset about that sort of double billing or pay twice thing. What's your thoughts on that?

SPEAKER_21: Facebook's trying to be a business.

SPEAKER_04: Yeah.

SPEAKER_21: I mean, you know, before it was a fire hose, right? As soon as they like your page, you could spam the shit out of them. Right. But, and one, by the way, that's a little bit annoying for a consumer as well. Right. Right? And so now they're making Coca-Cola, you know, if you do a normal status update, it's only going to hit a certain percentage of your followers unless you promote it.

SPEAKER_223: What percentage does that typically mean? Like, 5% or 10%?

SPEAKER_21: I actually don't know the exact percentage. But it's definitely not 100 what it used to be, which is the fire hose, right? And so now they make you promote it so you can actually extend through not just your followers, but people outside of it as well. Gotcha. And so, but yeah, I mean, it's part of Facebook becoming a business, and that's, you know...

SPEAKER_262: What about Twitter? I mean, Twitter, if you follow Coca-Cola, you get every Coca-Cola update. Yeah.

SPEAKER_12: So it feels safer to get followers on Twitter.

SPEAKER_21: Well, Twitter's ad network is also very new. It's newer than Facebook's, and so they're still figuring it out. Right. I mean, they're still making... When you first kicked off Twitter ad campaigns, we've been doing it for a while now, and the very first ones, you had no targeting.

SPEAKER_147: Zero targeting. Zero targeting. You just put promoted tweet. Just promoted tweet.

SPEAKER_21: What can you target by now? Now they have things very similar to Facebook, like interest or keywords. They have keyword targeting as well.

SPEAKER_108: What about another follower? Like, so I want people who follow at Coca-Cola or at Pepsi.

SPEAKER_21: I think you can do that. You can definitely... So that's the cool stuff that you can start doing Facebook now. Right. They have these things called... So they're custom audiences and then lookalike audiences. So you can... A custom audience, you know, if I've ad stage, we can actually upload our entire email list of users that have, you know, signed up for ad stage and say... And then create a lookalike audience and say, we want to target people like those folks.

SPEAKER_52: Oh, really?

SPEAKER_04: Oh, that's so genius. Yeah. All right. Listen, continued success with ad stage. I'm really proud to have the launch fund invest in the company. And God, we learned so much on this program about online advertising. Obviously, the industry is getting huge. Adstage.io. And what's your...

SPEAKER_83: So, what's your Twitter handle?

SPEAKER_235: Mine is at Sahilio.

SPEAKER_26: Sahilio. Yes. S-A-H-I-L-L-O? S-A-H-I-L-I-O. I-O. Yeah.

SPEAKER_281: That's pretty funny.

SPEAKER_61: Yeah, it's a nickname I've had for a long time.

SPEAKER_281: All right. Sahilio is your nickname?

SPEAKER_61: Yeah.

SPEAKER_238: I didn't know that. It's kind of like Coolio, right? It's cool. It is pretty Coolio. Hey, listen, look at this. $1.4 million in funding. $1.5.

SPEAKER_283: $1.5 million in funding. Freestyle. 500 Startups. Digital Garage. Oh, and Venata, formerly of Twitter. John Battelle. John Battelle, my boy. Rich LaFergie, the founder of IAB. Oh, Stuart Alsop. Wow, you got Rich LaFergie of the IAB. Lots of great people invested in the company. Continued success. Everybody, check out AdStage.io, and thanks to our sponsors. We'll see you next time on This Week in Startups. Bye-bye.