Tag: facebook

Polygraph Media is Disrupting the Advertising Industry through Data and Analytics

August 15, 2017 / / 0 Comments

Chris Treadaway, founder and CEO of Polygraph Media courtesy photo.

Chris Treadaway doesn’t chain smoke or drink cocktails all day at his office at WeWork at the Domain.

But he is living a Modern-Day version of Mad Men, the AMC TV series that dramatized the lives of ad men in the 1960s at a fictional New York advertising agency.

Today, Treadaway is involved in the rapidly changing advertising technology industry. He founded Polygraph Media, with the idea of bringing transparency through data to advertising in 2011. The company today has 10 employees and it helps large brands execute massive advertising campaigns on Facebook.

Previously, Treadaway worked as group product manager of Web strategy at Microsoft. And he was a co-founder of Startfor, a global intelligence firm, based in Austin.

In this interview on the Ideas to Invoices podcast, Treadaway discusses how Polygraph Media has created Internet advertising technology that drives traffic and revenue via Facebook advertising for customers like McDonald’s, Fox TV and Six Flags.

The company, which started out at the Austin Technology Incubator, is bootstrapped and raised a seed round of funding from friends and family. It is profitable, according to Treadaway and plans for dramatic growth in Austin. It is hiring, particularly software developers focused on advertising.

It hasn’t been all smooth sailing for Polygraph Media. The startup put in 11 applications to get access to the Facebook Ads API before it got access, Treadaway said.

Next, Polygraph Media put in eight applications to become a Facebook advertising partner. Facebook acknowledged the company as an advertising technology partner in December of 2016. It is one of 81 companies in the world. It is the only one that hasn’t taken institutional capital, Treadaway said.

“We’ve been able to achieve some very big things thus far and so now we’re growing the business very rapidly,” Treadaway said.

Along the way, Polygraph Media has pivoted a few times. Its first product was a local advertising system, aimed at small to medium sized businesses. It signed six newspapers as customers.

“We kind of got whacked by Groupon,” Treadaway said.

Groupon came into the market with a simple and elegant minimum viable product for customer acquisition, Treadaway said. So, Polygraph Media redefined its product around data and analytics. That pushed the company into the path of advertising and that’s where it found where it fits in the world, Treadaway said.

Its flagship product is called Commander and it is an interface into a data platform that enables large scale advertising campaigns on Facebook for big customers like McDonalds, Cheddars and others.

Through its Commander product, Polygraph Media helps brands go from spending $1 million a year on Facebook ads to $10 million a year, Treadaway said. Its platform handles all the complexity involved with that, he said.

Last year, Polygraph Media powered 3,200 stores worth of advertising for McDonald’s.

“People do not let us into McDonald’s very easily or another similarly sized company,” Treadaway said.

Polygraph Media must provide a lot of value to service those large customers, he said.

“These are investments to these brands” Treadaway said. “Advertising is no longer about throwing money at the wall and hope something sticks.”

For the past few years, Polygraph Media and Treadaway have focused on having an investment mindset. Treadaway must quantify how his company provides better returns than what the company might achieve on its own, he said. He’s able to do that through the company’s proprietary data platform, he said.

“Us entrepreneurs if you can think from an investor perspective about your decisions and to frame things that way you’re going to be in a better place,” Treadaway said.

Facebook has thousands of targeting permutations, Treadaway said. Polygraph Media can test different versions of an ad and find the right customers for the right companies to produce outsized returns, Treadaway said. That means more customers in the doors of stores buying their products and generating more revenue.

Facebook has 17 ad types that Polygraph Media taps into today, Treadaway said.

Being platform dependent on Facebook is a risk for Polygraph Media, but the company is actively pursuing ways to mitigate that risk, Treadaway said.

For more on the interview, download and listen to the podcast. Please rate and review the podcast on iTunes.

Facebook Reaches Out to Small Businesses in Austin

July 24, 2014 / / 0 Comments

By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

Dan Levy, Facebook's director of small business at the Facebook Austin Fit event.

Dan Levy, Facebook’s director of small business at the Facebook Austin Fit event.

Facebook, with more than 1 billion active users, has become the digital main street for small business owners from plumbers to jewelry stores.

They can hang their shingle, a Facebook business page, and reach their small town customers or a global audience.

And just a fraction of Facebook’s 30 million small to medium-sized businesses are active advertisers. In the last month, 1.5 million businesses spent anywhere from a few dollars to thousands of dollars on Facebook ads, said Dan Levy, the company’s director of small business. But it’s growing. And the growth is coming from mobile customers.

Of the small businesses using Facebook, 19 million actively manage their page from a mobile device, Levy said.

“If you’ve got a mobile phone and a Facebook page, you’ve got a mobile strategy,” he said.

IMG_3514Levy spoke at the first Facebook Fit Austin, a boot-camp style event to educate small business owners about how to use Facebook effectively to grow their companies. The sold out event drew more than 1,000 people to the morning and afternoon sessions at the Austin Music Hall. It featured a keynote speech from Levy, a small business panel discussion with local businesses and training sessions led by Facebook and its partner companies, QuickBooks, Square and LegalZoom.

It’s the first time Facebook has held these kinds of events in communities across the country, Levy said. The Austin event was the largest of five events, he said. Facebook also has an office in Austin with a few hundred employees. It handles North American small business sales from here, he said.

Small businesses have contributed to significantly to Facebook’s revenue growth. The 10-year-old company Wednesday reported revenue of $2.91 billion for the second quarter, up 61 percent from the same time a year ago. And mobile advertising revenue represented 62 percent of all its ad revenue, up from 41 percent for the same quarter a year ago.

Facebook’s advertising has gotten more sophisticated in recent years with more targeted ads. The company offers small businesses the chance to upload email lists and target their current customers using Facebook’s platform. They can also get really specific in targeting customers by location, gender, interests and other factors. Facebook also lets business owners “boost” their daily posts to reach more people for a few dollars or $50 or more.

“We want to be the solution that helps them reach their customers,” Levy said. “It’s really important for us to make ads that are relevant. Our goal is for the ads to be as good, if not better, than the content you see on Facebook.”

During his morning keynote, Levy said even plumbers have grown their sales using Facebook. He gave the example of Morgan Miller Plumbing in Kansas City. Jeff Morgan, owner, has landed new customers and hired employees on Facebook. He has seen a 39 times the return on the $2,000 he’s spent on Facebook ads.

The key is being authentic, Levy said. Morgan has built his brand and expanded his business by telling who he is. Trust is a major issue when it comes to hiring a plumber and Morgan provides information about his employees along with pictures of them on the Facebook site.

The Austin small business panel at Facebook Fit

The Austin small business panel at Facebook Fit

To illustrate how local small businesses are using Facebook, Rhonda Abrams, author and USA Today columnist, moderated a panel featuring Chi’Lantro, Korean infused Tex-Mex food, Allens Boots, Yeti Coolers and Kendra Scott Jewelry.

Chi’Lantro, with more than 10,000 likes on Facebook, spends about $400 to $500 a month on Facebook ads to promote its food trucks, said Jae Kim, its owner. He started Chi’Lantro with $28,000 in savings and financed it with his credit cards. He now has five trucks in Austin and Houston, 25 employees and he plans to open a brick and mortar restaurant this year.

Yeti Coolers, founded in 2006 in Austin, makes high-end durable coolers for hunters, anglers and other outdoor enthusiasts. The company has 150 employees and more than 212,000 likes on its Facebook page. Yeti uses Facebook to communicate with its customers and to build brand loyalty and awareness, said Harrison Lindsey, its digital content coordinator. Authenticity is key to building the brand on Facebook, he said.

“We have to be very authentic and understand what our customer needs are,” he said.

IMG_3513Allens Boots, which has a location on Congress Avenue and a store in Round Rock, doesn’t do traditional radio ads anymore, said Kirsten King, marketing manager. It has also created two Facebook pages updated for the different customers in the separate stores, she said.

“The good thing about it is it’s cheap,” King said.

She estimates Allens Boots gets seven times return on its ad spend on Facebook.

Kendra Scott Jewelry, with more than 51,000 likes on Facebook, uses online analytics and tailors its posts to its targeted customer base, women between the ages of 18 to 34, said Lara Schmieding, spokeswoman. Its market research on Facebook has also helped the company decide where to open its next store in 2015, she said.

Randi Zuckerberg Navigates the “dot complicated” World

December 14, 2013 / / 0 Comments

By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

Moria Forbes, publisher of Forbes Woman, interviewing Randi Zuckerberg, author of dot complicated: Untangling Our Wired Lives

Moria Forbes, publisher of Forbes Woman, interviewing Randi Zuckerberg, author of dot complicated: Untangling Our Wired Lives

Randi Zuckerberg navigated the early years of social media at Facebook and remembers a pivotal moment while working on the 2008 election.
“We obviously were drinking the Kool-Aid of social media in Silicon Valley,” Zuckerberg said.
But she was shocked at how the presidential campaigns weren’t using Facebook and social media. She remembers calling the McCain staff and the Clinton staff and begging them to use Facebook and social media. But it was the Obama campaign that got onboard early and they did so without Facebook even reaching out to them. The Obama campaign’s site on Facebook contributed a significant part to that election, Zuckerberg said.
“For Facebook, people stopped thinking of it as just a college site and really starting thinking of it as a meaningful platform for political change,” she said.
From there, Zuckerberg started specializing in global politics, elections and media partnerships at Facebook.
At Dell World, Moira Forbes, publisher of ForbesWoman, interviewed Zuckerberg, now CEO of Zuckerberg Media, during a Thursday afternoon session. Zuckerberg is a former marketing executive at Facebook and author of dot complicated, a book on navigating the online world.

Zuckerberg launched her own media company

Zuckerberg got her start as a journalist working at Forbes on Fox.
Several years later, she launched her media company at Facebook, which held hack-a-thons every few months at its headquarters. People stayed up all night long and the only rule was that they had to work on a passion project outside their day jobs. And one of Zuckerberg’s passion projects was to start a television network inside Facebook. They had hundreds of millions of people using the platform at that time. She wanted to reach that audience with her own television show.
At one of the hack-a-thons, she launched her show from inside a broom closet at Facebook. She turned on a camera and began broadcasting live online. For the first show, she had six viewers and two of them were her parents.
About a week later, representatives from Singer and Songwriter Katy Perry contacted her and said Perry wanted to be on her Facebook television show.
“Then I had to pretend it was an actual television show,” Zuckerberg said.
During the next few months, she had so many celebrities and people who appeared on the television show that it showed her the power of social media and live content.
“So when President Obama asked if he could come on this Facebook television show and talk to all of America, I thought this is the moment and this is what I clearly love to do,” Zuckerberg said.
That’s when she quit her job at Facebook and launched her own media company. And she was pregnant, but she knew what she wanted to do and she wanted to take a big risk. She sold her house and put all her assets into the new company.

Navigating the dot complicated life

imgres-2Forbes then asked Zuckerberg what dot complicated meant to her and why she decided to write the book.
“Ask any random person on the street if they’ve had a “dot complicated” moment recently, you don’t even have to describe what that means, and they’ll probably say yes, let me tell you about it,” Zuckerberg said.
It might be about posting something inappropriate or someone else posting something objectionable online, she said. Mobile devices have become pervasive in our lives and they have changed every aspect of it, from finding love to parenting, Zuckerberg said.
“I have a very complicated relationship with technology, if I have this very complicated relationship, surely millions of people around the world do too. They feel like their lives are a bit overwhelmed and maybe they can learn or laugh at my story and maybe we can navigate this world together,” she said.
Zuckerberg detailed many of the most dot complicated moments of her life in the book in hopes that people can learn from them.
For example, she recounted a time when she was playing with her six month old son, she was also answering emails and texting. Then she noticed her son pick up the remote control and act like he was text messaging on it.
That’s when she realized she needed to manage her relationship with technology so she wouldn’t teach her son that technology was competing for her time with him.

The quest for privacy in an increasing transparent online world

Forbes said Zuckerberg wrote a lot about privacy in her book. She asked Zuckerberg how she managed to maintain her personal privacy and keep it separate from her public persona.
Zuckerberg recounted that last Christmas she was with her family and they were all standing around the kitchen table texting on different devices and she took a picture. She posted it to her friends on Facebook. A few hours later she saw it on a bunch of tech blogs. One of her friends had leaked the photo. She was disappointed. She knew that she shouldn’t post anything online, if she wasn’t comfortable with it going viral, but she didn’t think her friends would betray her trust.
“In our real lives, we have three levels of privacy – we have things that are super private for us and our spouses, things that are super public like announcing a new career move, but most of our life, the vast majority, lives in the middle, it’s personal,” Zuckerberg said.
“But online you really only get private and public, you lose personal and we live so much of our lives in there,” she said.
In the book, she wrote about how to get that back and what happens when a person loses that.

Being a leader in a world filled with social media

Photo courtesy of Zuckerberg Media

Photo courtesy of Zuckerberg Media

Zuckerberg also discussed the different generations of management in the workforce. Older workers tend to be more conservative and don’t share as much and millennial workers feel comfortable sharing their lives online, Forbes said. But now more than ever, being authentic is increasingly important to building a following, to getting people inspired by your mission and to becoming an effective leader, Forbes said.
The professional and personal identities have been blended, Zuckerberg said. Companies need to provide social media training to their employees when they hire them, she said.
Millennials want to be posting all the time, Zuckerberg said
“It’s better to arm them with things that they should be posting about rather than letting their imaginations run wild,” she said.
Today, every single employee is an ambassador for your brand, Forbes said.
And every company is a media company, Zuckerberg said.
That can be quite a challenge, Zuckerberg said. She’s had some awkward conversations with people about things that they’ve posted that she never thought she would have to have.
“People have freedom of speech,” she said. “You can’t tell them don’t post things on Twitter, nor would you want to govern who they are. That’s why you hired them in the first place.”
But data does show that it makes you more likeable if you share personal things online and Facebook friend your boss, Zuckerberg said.

Etiquette lessons learned along the way

Forbes asked Zuckerberg about the toughest online social etiquette lesson she had to learn.
Zuckerberg recounted a time when she and her friends couldn’t get into a bar in New York because they didn’t look cool enough.
“I desperately wanted to be so cool even though I was a Silicon Valley geek and we got rejected from this really cool bar. It sucked,” she said.
Twitter had just launched as a platform. She took out her mobile phone and she tweeted wouldn’t it be bad if that bouncer’s Facebook profile went down.
“Wow, really bad thing to say, very irresponsible and the tech press really took me to storm about that,” Zuckerberg said. “It was ironic because I had been spending the last few years educating celebrities, politicians and business leaders about how all of our voices travel faster and farther than ever thanks to this megaphone of social media. But what I hadn’t realized, I hadn’t stepped back and thought, gosh, I have a megaphone too. All of us are sort of mini-celebrities in this world. All of us could go viral at any moment.”
Everyone needs to be very vigilant about their reputations and how they manage social media, Zuckerberg said.

Unplugging from technology

Forbes asked Zuckerberg about managing the constant flow of technology and doing “digital detoxes,” in which people disconnect from their devices.
People are connecting around the clock and people must set boundaries on their own personal time.
“Set some firm rules,” Zuckerberg said. “The more you start setting those rules, the more you’ll train the people around you to respect those times too.”
She has a rule in her house: no tech in the bedroom.
She also said studies show that people who don’t connect with technology whether it’s Facebook, their mobile phone, texts, email, voicemail, first thing in the morning, are happier. She said it’s best to manage the technology and not let it manage your life. She avoids her mobile phone for the first 40 minutes of every day.
“All devices have a curfew in our house for that reason,” she said. “You need that moment of clarity and unplugging in your day.”

Sparefoot Spearheads Back to School Supply Drive

July 24, 2012 / / 0 Comments

Will Tweet or Facebook post for school supplies.
That’s the idea behind a social charity program spearheaded by Austin tech startup Sparefoot, which puts consumers in touch with storage facilities.
Sparefoot will donate $3 worth of basic school supplies for every Facebook share and Tweet about what memento they’ve stored since grade school. The donations will go to a school supply drive for Communities In Schools of Central Texas, a nonprofit focused on dropout-prevention.
“We launched this company while I was still in school myself,” Chuck Gordon, Sparefoot Founder and CEO, said in a news release. “Our goal with Supply Memories is to give other students a similar opportunity to succeed, no matter their circumstances.
To participate, visit Sparefoot on Facebook or visit Supply Memories to learn more about the Twitter program.

The Open Compute Project helps data centers save energy and increase efficiency

May 2, 2012 / / 2 Comments

By L.A. Lorek

Data centers gobble up energy.
But some of the smartest minds in the information technology industry want to change that.
They are meeting in San Antonio today and tomorrow to rethink the old ways of putting together servers, power and cooling units and the rest of the guts of data centers to save energy and increase efficiency.
It’s called the Open Compute Project, launched last April by Facebook with the goal of creating the most efficient computer hardware and software for data centers. Of course not everyone has joined the project. Google, Microsoft and Amazon are not on board. But lots of major players like Facebook and Rackspace are.
And in just a year, the Open Compute Project has made data centers 38 percent more efficient to run and 24 percent less expensive to build, according to the organization. The group comes up with new hardware and software standards and then they share those with everyone else. The entire data center industry benefits from the open collaborative work of the best engineers in a variety of companies.
About 500 data center leaders from Intel, AMD, Hewlett Packard, Dell, Facebook, Rackspace and more met today at Rackspace’s headquarters in San Antonio for the third summit designed to hammer out designs and think up projects to improve the way data centers operate.

Frank Frankovsky with Facebook

Wednesday morning, Frank Frankovsky, vice president of hardware design and supply chain at Facebook, gave the keynote address on the progress made in the last year.
First off, Frankovsky showed a slide listing dozens of new companies that have joined the movement including HP, AMD, Fidelity, Quanta, Tencent, Salesforce.com, VMware, HP and others. Frankovsky wrote a blog post on May 2 providing a full list of new members and detailing all the accomplishments in the past year.
And later on the stage, executives from HP and Dell both unveiled their newly redesigned servers dubbed Project Coyote and Project Zeus respectively.
The objectives of the Open Compute Project are scale, value, simplicity, sustainability and openness, Frankovsky said. That involves rethinking the entire data center from the racks that house the servers to the electrical systems that connect them together.
“We’re ditching the 19 inch rack design,” he said.
A big part of that is creating new 21-inch width standard for racks inside data centers to replace the outdated 19-inch racks, which date back to the 1950s, Frankovsky said.
“We want people to differentiate less and innovate more,” he said.
Following Frankovsky, Glenn Keels, HP, director of marketing of its hyperscale business unit, said the reason HP joined the Open Compute Project was because “leaders do not sit on their laurels” and “leaders develop standards.” HP is number one or number two in the data center markets it serves, Keels said. HP powers some of the largest cloud data centers in the world including Facebook, he said.
The cloud market is small but growing exponentially between now and 2020, Keels said.
“HP has begun to think differently,” Keels said. HP is transforming servers and changing the experience with projects like moonshot, voyager and odyssey aimed at improving efficiencies in the data center, Keels said.
“Open Compute Project is the most robust group of problem solvers focused on the data center space and moving from technology and form factors of 1995 to today to reclaim stranded time, space and power,” Keels said.
“We have to reinvent ourselves every time and Open Compute is a fantastic forum for us to do that,” Keels said. “Standardization has the ability to unlock innovation.”
Keels unveiled HP’s Coyote open rack standard at the conference.
Then Forrest Norrod, vice president and general manager of Dell’s Data Center Solutions Group, showed off Dell’s new server and storage designs that meet the Open Rack specifications.
“Dell is deeply rooted in our support for open alliances,” Norrod said. “It’s in our DNA…We are very active in our support for open source.”
Rackspace is also active in the open source movement and in creating less expensive and more efficient data centers. Late Wednesday morning, Mark Roenigk, Rackspace’s chief operating officer, detailed the company’s plans in an interview.
Rackspace has nine data centers globally including two in the United Kingdom and one in Hong Kong. Its U.S. data centers are in Chicago, Dallas-Fort Worth and the Washington, D.C. area,.
“We shuttered two in San Antonio in the last six months due to inefficiencies,” Roenigk said. “There’s a great example of how quickly this technology is moving.”
In the last two years, Rackspace has seen a 22 percent efficiency improvement in its data centers, Roenigk said.
Rackspace plans to leverage the Open Compute Project designs for computer servers, storage, network and utilities in its next generation data center, which it plans soon, Roenigk said.
Overall, Rackspace has 80,000 servers online serving 172,000 customers today.
“We want to be influential in the design of the hardware,” Roenigk said.
So Rackspace works closely with original equipment makers like HP and Dell, he said.
“Most recently we’ve increased the density of a rack from 7 kilowatts to 18 kilowatts a rack providing more computing power coming out of a smaller footprint,” Roenigk said. “That means less cost which is passed on to our customers.”
Sustainability and saving energy is a core covenant of the Open Computer Project, Roenigk said.
“We were recently judged by Greenpeace in a report “How Clean Is Your Cloud,” Roenigk said. “We’re pleased that even though we’re a small player in the market, we’re in the middle of the pack.”
“We think we can be a big influencer in data center efficiency and the power used to power those data centers,” Roenigk said.
Those decisions on being green stem from the sources that Rackspace uses to power its data centers. That’s why it has bypassed states, which provide cheap power from coal sources in favor of hydro electric, wind and natural gas sources.
“We’re really about serving customers,” Roenigk said. “They pull us and push us in different directions all the time.”
Two years ago, only one in 25 customers ever brought up the subject of sustainability when talking about hosting, Roenigk said.
“Today it is more like six or seven in ten,” he said. “It is now a real part of the sourcing and procurement process.”
On Thursday, engineers attending the summit will hammer out their ideas in special sessions that go very, very deep, Roenigk said. The Open Compute Project has a formal process for people to bring forth their ideas, he said. The board decides which projects are going to drive the most value to the open source community. Then the engineers meet once or several times a week. When they are done, they publish their design specifications to members of the Open Compute Project to use, Roenigk said.
“Linux took 20 years to become a standard,” Roenigk said. “We will do what Linux did in 20 years in five years or less.”

The following video is from Rackspace and explains its role in the Open Compute Project.

Rackspace is a sponsor of Silicon Hills News

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