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Airtory was founded in 2016 by Julian Frachtman and Ashwin Krishnakumar and operates out of Austin, TX and Bangalore, India. Privately held, the company developed a breakthrough proprietary platform that allowed advertisers to build high performing rich media ads within minutes. Now, with the launch of SelfServePlus, publishers can use Airtory to open up their own inventory to advertisers. WNIP caught up with Julian Frachtman, CEO, to find out more…
What business problem is your company addressing?
Airtory’s core platform is a rich media ad and landing page creation suite that comes paired with a 3rd party ad server. Our aspiration is to be the Squarespace for rich media ad creation based on our 250+ and growing HTML5 templated options. Publishers are being forced to do much more with significantly fewer resources and leveraging Airtory can help them deliver high impact and value units with less overhead.
Airtory’s new product offering, SelfServePlus is a platform built on top of DFP’s API and allows publishers to open up their placements and invite advertisers into the platform. Once in, advertisers can select the unit placement and then use Airtory’s ad creation suite to create ads, whether that be one of our HTML5 units or a non-IAB standard native unit.
Leveraging SelfServePlus will greatly reduce overhead related to sales and internal operations for the publisher and as they move PMP or programmatic direct deals over to SelfServePlus, they will be able to save the 20%-30% margins they were previously having to pay out to their DSP and SSP vendors.
Can you give some examples of publishers successfully using your solution?
We are currently rolling out the platform to our first beta customers (and are looking for more!), so it’s too early for us to give specific examples.
Pricing?
Standard pricing for ad creation and serving is $.80 CPM with volume discounts available.
For SelfServePlus, eventually we will be charging a $1,500/month SaaS fee along with $.80 CPM on any ads served through the system. For our beta customers, including any that sign up with us through the end of the year, we will waive the SaaS fee for the first 6 months, at which point they can decide if they want to continue using the service.
What are other people doing in the space and why?
We identify other players in the rich media ad creation and serving space, essentially, as Adobe Photoshop for ad creation – they are extremely complex and customizable, but that comes with greater overhead and time investment as well as enterprise pricing. With our templates and pricing, publishers are still able to create high-quality HTML5 units, but at a fraction of the cost and time.
Other players solving a similar problem to SelfServePlus can provide the marketplace and direct buying experience to publishers, albeit at a significantly higher price, but none of them have an ad creation component built directly into the ad purchase funnel, which provides significant value to the advertisers.
How do you view the future?
Our goal is to continue to build out tools that will empower publishers to focus less time and energy on monetization and focus on creating the content their readers love. As more and more advertisers look to in-house creative functions from their agencies, the ability to provide both them and publishers and easy to use, yet powerful platform to execute on ad creation and serving will help to maintain margins as they continue to truncate.
Anything else we should know?
As mentioned, we are looking for beta customers, so if SelfServePlus seems like a solution that might work for you, please reach out.
Thank you.
