Featured ZINOpreneur of the Week: Brook Lang of Montavo

ZINO Society presents our featured ZINOpreneur Member of the Week:  Brook Lang of Montavo, Inc.

• What is your one-sentence elevator pitch? . . . 

Retail advertisers need Montavo’s retail MaaP to understand the direct correlation between their TV and Digital advertising spend and their in-store sales revenue and profits.

• How did you come up with the idea for your company? . . .

We were fascinated by the prevalence of advertiser-supported business models for a new generation of Internet businesses. I started to dig into retail advertising and the opportunities that web & mobile advertising technologies would create. There were some really interesting plays but many were using coupons and that’s an extraordinarily limited market – right around 5% of the total advertising spend. The other thread we pulled on was the idea that digital advertising – for all the “big data” and analytics focus – was justified using clicks and unique visits and a host of other metrics. But not correlating ads to bricks and mortar sales revenue and profits because the technology didn’t exist. So that’s what we set out to solve. It’s an enormous opportunity when you can show an advertiser exactly where their $100 million in digital ad spending went and how that directly translated into consumers going to a physical bricks and mortar store and buying their products or services.  As the idea was that for the system to work, the solution needed to be that the consumer never registered with the entity the ad was viewed on or the advertiser themselves – i.e. the consumer does not do anything different then then ever did in the past.

• The word that best describes your company culture is . . .

Seasoned. [We don’t issue learner’s permits and every one on our team has been here before.]

• How are you different from your competition? . . . 

We have the simplest and clearest differentiation in the world: we are the only company that can provide this data to advertisers and every advertiser wants this data.

• What is the biggest challenge you face? . . .

Really, I think it’s the sheer magnitude of our opportunity. Sometimes that works against you. We’ve found an almost unlimited supply of investors who will gladly write a check once the product is shipping and the first customer deploys our solution. But you have to get there. We’re closer to a biotech investment model: it’s an enormous opportunity but it takes a little more effort and money/capital to get to market then is the usual for a software company today. If you think of our kind of analytics as being worth a very small fraction of an advertiser’s budget and that global advertising spending is over half a trillion dollars per year, we don’t have to establish much of a beachhead to generate very significant numbers. So, our challenge has been in trying to demonstrate and show investors an enormous opportunity, moderated with suitably conservative projections, but a potential not dissimilar to Google before they shipped version 1 of Search.

• How much money have you raised to date? . . . 

We have raised $1.5 million, lifetime to date. We’ve recently secured a significant portion of our current round and that guarantees the development of release 1.0 in the fall of this year.  Now we are just filling in the additional capital needed to hire and run Sales & Marketing and Business Development.

• If someone gave your company $3 million tomorrow, how would you use the money? . . . 

We’ve eliminated 95% of technology risk (we’re down to execution) and are at a pure go-to-market stage, so we’d spend on the product launch, hiring and supporting a sales team, and recruiting a business development executive. Our singular focus is to establish a series of toe holds with national brand advertisers and then we’ll leverage those relationships into a broader market strategy.

• Why will your company be successful? . . .

There are three fundamental reasons:

1.    Compelling nature of our opportunity – enormous market potential, no direct competitors, near ubiquitous demand for what we have

2.    Proprietary technology – our service is enabled by Montavo-proprietary technologies that serve as a strong barrier-to-entry

3.    Strength of the Team – we are building a team that: a) has passion for addressing a critical gap in the market, b) has been through the start-up to wealth-creation phases before and, c) has a combined depth and breadth of experience that is remarkable.