Conversation with DesignBlox on Adroit

Earlier this week I spoke with Judy Gern, CEO of DesignBlox, a Web shop who have created an innovative online advertising product called Adroit. Before I get into the conversation, I am jumping into a rant. This is a product that I assume Judy wants to market and gain customers for outside of her Web shop customer base. Yet, when you do a search on Google for "adroit", nothing on the first page is even remotely relevant to the product we discussed. In fact, some of the sites listed would be considered competitors for her Web shop. I *almost* want to fire the pr/marketing firm. How can you put out a product without (at a minimum) purchasing the keywords on Google/Yahoo/etc? Why should it be so hard for me to find the link to the site? Imagine two marketers speaking and one walks away to check out Adroit. How in the bloody heck do they find it without knowing it's made by DesignBlox? If you can't get the organic results (not sure why they can't get to 1st on this term), at a mimum buy the keyword for your product or service immediately. Rant over.

The Adroit product is pretty innovative from what I have seen and could offer big financial savings for companies who pay designers for rounds of revisions. In my previous life, ad trafficking sucked. Put out a banner creative, watch the performance, and get the designer to tweak ad to find optimum performance. Rinse and repeat. Adroit allows you to basically create new flash ads on the fly. The designer/developer sets up the ad with all of the imagery built-in as needed and editable text, and then Adroit can swap in new text as the marketer/agency decides.  Images can also be swapped as needed. Judy claims one client has saved over $25,000 in design fees by using Adroit. I assume that didn't take into account the fees and costs involved with using Adroit.

The swapping function allows the marketer to run A/B and multi-variate testing very easily. In our demo, it took about five minutes to setup a full 20 variations test for a flash ad. Track the performance of each ad in the test and then run with whichever works best. What's great is that when using Adroit, you save the issue of uploading new creatives and time to inject those new ads into an ad run. With this, you can change the ads immediately.

The tool has a solid analytics and reporting function as well. I could see Web agencies loving this tool and white labeled it could do well with the larger Web ad agencies. I also spoke with Judy about partnering with advertising providers such as DoubleClick and she seemed open to that.

It's an interesting tool and well worth a look if you are running testing with online advertising. That is... if you can find it.