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Helping keep tabs on consumers

TECH MATTERS | MediaBank developing an operating system so agencies know if their efforts are working

 

Chicago Sun Times - August 27, 2007

BRAD SPIRRISON
brad@midwestbusiness.com
Sun-Times Columnist

Among the advantages of purchasing digital media is buyers' ability to better understand how audiences respond to their campaigns.

Consumer insight is more easily and reliably found via a computer mouse than a remote control because marketers can reliably track what individuals are doing while connected to the Internet. That's not the case for the television industry and other endangered species within the kingdom of analog media.

While monitoring how people respond to a radio jingle or newspaper ad is easier said than done, Chicago-based startup MediaBank is recruiting advertising agencies to participate in just such a venture.

The company, which was founded in 2006 and recently raised $10.5 million from Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm New Enterprise Associates, is developing an "operating system for all media buying" that will enable agencies to purchase and eventually assess the performance of all of their campaigns, said founder and CEO Brad Keywell.

"We can do this across every media type -- both analog and digital -- with one user experience and one database," said Keywell, 37, a serial entrepreneur and investor who has been a protege of Sam Zell for nearly two decades. "The real opportunity comes in the analytics of what you learn from this stuff."

As Keywell courts agencies to license his company's ad management software, it shouldn't hurt that former CEOs of Kraft, McDonald's, R.R. Donnelly and Leo Burnett Worldwide serve on MediaBank's board of directors.

While the company is building algorithms it hopes will produce meaningful consumer analytics, the MediaBank platform also guides advertisers through every process of a transaction including sourcing inventory, negotiating prices and reconciling purchases.

New Enterprise Associates, also an investor in South Side grid computing company CleverSafe, is an elite venture firm that has backed publicly traded companies including TiVo, Salesforce.com and Chicago-based InnerWorkings Inc.

In addition to corporate DNA, InnerWorkings shares an address with MediaBank at the old Montgomery Ward building at 600 W. Chicago Ave.

MediaBank employs approximately 80 people, with more than half based in Chicago.

Eight years ago, Keywell co-founded (with Innerworkings founder and MediaBank board member Eric Lefkofsky) online promotional products distributor Starbelly Inc.

After raising millions in venture capital, Starbelly in 2000 was acquired by HA-LO Industries for $240 million. Once an industry leader with more than $600 million in sales and 5,500 employees, HA-LO gutted itself trying to transition to an Internet company through expensive investments, and in 2001 declared bankruptcy. Along the way, Keywell and Lefkofsky pocketed millions while facing accusations of selling HA-LO a bill of goods.

"I've had an unbelievable amount of learning," Keywell said. "Hopefully everything I do is a reflection of the lessons I've had both good and bad."

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