Internet advertising has been a dynamic industry ever since the days of Prodigy and America Online. From buying basic text advertisements on the earliest websites, to buying cost per impression, cost per click, cost per action, then back to cost per impression, and finally back to buying text links, the market is always changing. Since its founding in 2001, MediaWhiz has stayed on top of the advertising marketplace by building out new services for their advertisers and publishers, or buying existing companies.
MediaWhiz has acquired a number of companies in recent years and now has six brands under the MediaWhiz parent: Monetizeit, Filinet, AdNet, Coregistration.com, White Delivery, and Text Link Ads. In April, MediaWhiz brought on Jonathan Shapiro as CEO of MediaWhiz. We recently had the pleasure of spending some time speaking with Jonathan- below are excerpts from our conversation:
Will: Tell me about yourself-
Jonathan: I graduated from the Wharton program at the University of Pennsylvania, worked for a couple of years and then got an MBA from Stanford. After Stanford, I went to work at Mckinsey and Company. At Mckinsey, I saw that Media and Technology were going to converge- and I wanted to be a part of that!
I then joined United Media, where I met Kevin Ryan, who went on to be the CEO of Double Click. A couple years after Kevin left to join Double Click, I decide to join him and became the Chief Strategy Officer, eventually taking on M&A duties as well.
And after DoubleClick, a leading edge technology company you…
Joined Lillian Vernon
A Fifty year old catalog company- not exactly what one would expect!
It was a great opportunity- I got to turn around a business with thousands of employees and hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue. We sold the company, and I decided to take a break from work.
What did you do with your time off?
I built an armoire. I enjoy woodworking, but had not had a chance to build something for 11 years (since I built my son a cradle). Around this time I was approached about the opportunity with Media Whiz, and decided it was a great fit.
What attracted you to Media Whiz, after working for a catalog retailer like Lillian Vernon?
I joked with my friends that after working at Lillian it was "nothing but net," so I knew I wanted to focus in the Internet space. I started to learn about the company and found that they had three key components in place that DoubleClick had when I was working there:
1) A great team
2) Rapid innovation
3) Already had success
These factors reminded me of the initial opportunity at DoubleClick and got me excited about working at Media Whiz.
What is your day to day role at Media Whiz?
Not to mess it up! (laughter). My job is to help accelerate success. To help our companies do more together, and create additional opportunities.
MediaWhiz has made a number of acquisitions over the past couple of years- to what extent do these companies work together?
We have an integrated strategy. The first priority we have is to make sure that all of our businesses are held accountable to our customers (our advertisers and publishers). We think that once a customer is happy with one of our offerings (for example lead generation) then they will want to do more with Media Whiz- perhaps work with our performance marketing group. All of our offerings need to work together.
Are you still looking at acquisitions?
We’re opportunistic about acquisitions.
Where would you like MediaWhiz to be in five years? Get Acquired? Go Public?
We’re focused on building the best possible business. If that leads to a partner acquiring us or going public, that’s a positive, but is not the focus. Now if Google called tomorrow with a $3 billion offer… I would take Sergey’s call.
Thank you very much for your time today-
Thank you
Interview conducted by Will Braunstein
Will@InteractiveAcquisition.com
www.InteractiveAcquisition.com
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