Prosperio founder and President Jimi Smoot worked in the online advertising place for nearly a decade and saw pain points in the media planning process that continued to remain unsolved. Media planning today continues to a largely manual practice using complex excel spreadsheets, that have only become more clunky with the increasing fragmentation of online advertising platforms, to send RFPs (request for proposals) back and forth between publishers and advertisers. Smoot saw the potential for a cloud-based solution to save online publishers and advertising agencies to save time, improve efficiency and gain more insights in their media buying. So he founded Prosperio, a media planning system to replace outdated processes and bring media buying into the cloud.
Smoot said he “thought problems in the industry were going to be solved at one point, but the same problems still exist to this day. Now things have to change, because data is going to much more important in the future.”
He said the industry will need to overlay revenue data to see how ad campaigns performed and that, “you need a system to capture transactional information.” He said he hopes Prosperio will be the platform to lead that way, especially as a platform built by industry insiders.
Prosperio conducted a national survey of media agency employees ranging from assistant media planners to the C-Suite and found that more than half of media investment professionals buy digital media and at least one other type of traditional media, complicating the RFP process. They found that it takes an average of 17 hours to build and send out an RFP and 21 hours to compile incoming response before media planners can evaluate a proposal. Prosperio provides an online tool to streamline that process and allow brands to buy advertising inventory directly from publishers programmatically, a process that can be opaque when working with a third party.
Unlike existing media planning platforms in the space, such as Google’s Mediavisor, Prosperio differentiates itself by focusing on building and running system built for media planning and buying, rather than being a side feature. The system also includes features solve pain points in the media planning process, such as managing technical specification sheets.
“Most other systems are more data entry platforms for ad serving and financials as an add-on,” Smoot said. “Our focus is on media planning and buying exclusively. That’s where our focus is, and one of the big things is to source and purchase inventory in system. Before getting RFPs to source in, customers can see inventory and transact.”
The company currently focuses on working with brands and their agencies and works with four different platforms to supply ads. Prosperio’s premium publishers include Mashable, lifehacker, VentureBeat and Reuters. Smoot said he predicts that 2014 will be a big year in the programmatic direct buying space, and that Prosperio will be one of the key players in that space and growth. He also observed that the relationship between different software companies and adtech are shifting as well, and Prosperio is set up in a position to take up the trend of this industry moving into the cloud.
Smoot, who currently doesn’t take a salary, pre-funded the company via a previous exit along with Launchpad LA. Prosperio currently is running lean with three full-time employees and estimates to grow the team to 10 in 2014, depending on revenue numbers, Smoot said.
“This is the year of scaling hard,” Smoot said. “We have done a lot of customer development. If you’re a competitor, be wary and be scared.”
