Advertising
5 mins read

Q&A: Airtory, next-generation ad creation tools

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Airtory was founded in 2016 by Julian Frachtman, CEO, and Aswhin Krishnakumar, CTO in Austin, Texas. Their aim? To build a next generation ad creation tool that leveraged a template-centric approach with a view to radically reducing the total time and costs related to designing, developing and deploying rich media display ads and landing pages. WNIP talked with Julian Frachtman to discover more…

Can you give us some background about your company?

Ashwin and I worked together at Perk.com, successfully selling the company to RhythmOne for $40 million. When we set up Airtory we held the view that many ad creation tools – especially those that had been in the market over the past couple of years – looked and acted like Adobe Photoshop, requiring significant skill, training and expense.  

With Airtory, on the other hand, we sought to become the “Wix or Squarespace” of rich media ad and landing page creation.

What business problem is your company addressing?

Marketing professionals understand that attracting their target audience is a crucial element of success. Sometimes this is easier said than done. Buyers are becoming increasingly sophisticated, conducting their own purchasing research, and being inundated with hundreds of pieces of marketing “noise” every day. In the always-changing digital marketing landscape, it’s critical for in-house marketing and creative teams, as well as external agencies and direct publishers, to create more ways to entice consumers to engage and interact with content.

A powerful tool in today’s marketing toolbox is the rich media ad. Offering up greater performance than more traditional ads, rich media is proven to amplify advertising efforts. Currently, publishers offering and supporting direct advertising opportunities on-site are being squeezed both in terms of CPMs they can charge as well as on their ad operations and creative resources size. By leveraging Airtory, they are able to quickly and with lower overhead, create and serve high impact, performance and RPM ad units in no time.

What is your core product addressing this problem?

Airtory’s platform is broken up into two main feature sets; ad creation and serving, and our landing page creation suite.

Leveraging over 250 rich media ad display templates (100 IAB standard & 150 non-standard units), Airtory enables creative and ad operation professionals to easily design, develop and deploy rich media ad formats that drive significantly higher consumer engagement and CTRs, at radically reduced costs. Our goal is to democratize the use of rich media ad formats by lowering the cost and time to create such ad formats.

We have produced a short demo video that provides an overview of Airtory’s Rich Media Ad Creation Studio:

The way most advertisers match up ads with destination pages today isn’t effective largely because nobody’s considering user experience post-click. Leveraging either 6 pre-built landing page templates, or starting with a blank page to select among 21 different best-practice landing page components, Airtory’s Landing Page Builder makes it easy for creative and ad operations professionals to quickly design and deploy custom landing pages that are consistent with the ad experience. The goal is to help marketers drive higher conversion rates.

A short demo video below provides an overview of Airtory’s Landing Page Builder:

Can you give some examples of publishers successfully using your solution?

Perhaps it would be best to give a couple of quotes from a Sr. Director of Ad Operations at one of our larger publisher clients – the quotes speak for themselves…

Outperforming Standard IAB Formats From Day One

“At a campaign level, we’ve seen a 40-60% improvement in overall ad performance since using Airtory’s ad experiences. That’s mainly measured by CTR, click through rate, with the experiences that we launched with Airtory as compared to our standard IAB format.

“Those performance metrics have resonated really well with our sales team as well as our clients, as you may imagine.”

Bigger Deals, Faster Production, Happier Teams

“One of Airtory’s biggest differentiators and one of the really helpful tools they’ve built within the Airtory UI is a per ad format specs sheet. That is incredibly helpful, and saves my team so much time.

“We’re leveraging those to send over to clients, telling them: “These are all the assets that we need in order to effectively build your experience.” Our team now is already so versed in knowing how to build these units, and thanks to Airtory’s UI, we’re able to make it easy for our clients to get us the assets we need to make their campaign a success – fast.”

Pricing?

Airtory’s pay-as-you-go pricing is $.80 CPM on ad-serving, with discounts available on our subscription offers as well as at volume.

What are other people doing in the space and why?

Other players within the rich media ad creation and serving space are very focused on providing essentially an Adobe Photoshop-like experience as it relates to rich media ad creation. With their platforms, brands, agencies and publishers are able to create literally any ad experience their heart desires. Of course, these types of capabilities come at a price. Ignoring the higher price-point of these platforms, they also require significant overhead related to creation and delivery of ad outputs as well.

Airtory’s goal is to be the Wix or Squarespace of rich media ad creation and to this end, we’ve developed 260+ rich media ad unit templates and have recently launched a desktop/mobile responsive landing page builder suite.  Airtory’s experience creation platform is well aligned for companies looking to realize cost savings on ad creation, ad serving, and internal overhead while still being able to deliver world-class rich media ad experiences.

How you do view the future?

One of our upcoming publisher focused products we’re most excited about is Self-Serve+. With this product, Airtory will provide publishers with an advertiser-facing platform that plugs into their DFP account, pulls in available placements and allows publishers to set price-floors. Advertisers will be able to log in, use Airtory’s native ad creation suite to create and bid for a specific placement opportunity. The publisher will then confirm brand safety and the transaction is closed.

For advertisers, they will be able to have greater agility on their direct media buys, be able to place native (and higher performing) ad units and have a slight discount from direct-sold deals. Publishers will be able to save the 20-30% margin on inventory that would have otherwise run through SSPs/DSPs and have a significantly lower overhead associated with this revenue. This aligns well with Airtory’s mission to empower publishers to gain value and efficiencies with our suite of products.

Anything else you’d like us to know?

Here’s a picture of myself and Ashwin with our team in Bangalore, India about to completely not escape from an Escape Room!

Thank you.