Reduce Data is an online ad-analytics and optimization platform that offers real time data, founded by Asif Ali who was the co-founder ZestADZ mobile advertising network acquired by Komli Media. StartupsFM spoke to Asif Ali, the founder of Reduce Data to understand how his startup is enabling small scale advertisers in optimizing their online ad campaigns combined with insights, auditing and tracking.
How did Reduce Data come into being?
Reduce Data officially started at the end of Sept 2012. It was born out of a pain point that I saw with my own previous advertisers.
They were managing campaigns across campaigns manually. They were wasting spends due to untargeted media buys across campaigns. Media waste was also happening due to various other reasons. Which they were not aware of. Also there were no tools to address for the kind of advertisers that I was working with. These were mostly small and medium advertising agencies. I have been in this domain for 4+ years with strong connections in mobile advertising.
Why do you feel that advertisers were wasting on media spends?
Statistics are like these:
- Wasted spends – 30-50% of the spends are estimated to be wasted
- Wasted spends = campaign budgets that are not utilized correctly
Now this happens due to various reasons:
- Ads not shown
- Fraud
- Wrong targeting
Advertisers tend to buy media on networks on assumptions that they will allocate the right ad spaces. Unfortunately this always doesn’t happen. Sometimes even the ad network cannot control that.
How is Reduce Data different from other players such as Pixalate and Adstage?
Adstage is a dashboard (reporting system) where as Reduce Data is an analytics + optimization system. (Dashboard = report ad network stats). However Reduce Data independently provides analytic. Our end goal is optimization while other players focus only reporting.
How did you initially reach out to your target market?
I have been contacting folks in the industry whom I have relationships with. We just also launched a free program during beta so that we can see larger adoption. We have also build some case studies before we hit a wider market. We are catering to advertisers and agencies. I would say that our target audience is small and medium sized (not the very large agencies or brands) because they probably are already using similar tools which are expensive. But when I say small, they are really small. These are companies who spend probably $10m a year in annual advertising budgets. The big guys use tools like Adobe Marketing Cloud and Web Trends.
What is the pricing model on Reduce Data?
Reduce Data is now available on a free plan. We charge on the basis of their advertising spend on a CPM model. We’re looking at them spending 10-15% of their advertising spends on Reduce Data. They can start with as low as $100 (but suggested budget is $1000). If an e-commerce portal is spending $10000 a month on 2 advertising engines, then they would spend – $1000×2 on reduce data which is about $2000 or 10%.
How has the Bay Area ecosystem helped your startup?
I live in Sunnyvale and I work out of Mountain View. I moved here recently and I am still networking. The ecosystem definitely seems to be very important in helping build a world class company. I am able to leverage the knowledge base of senior industry insiders to iterate and build a better product. have been leveraging mostly on Senior advisors from Tech giants who have massive experience in advertising industries. I have not yet tapped incubators but have had some meetings with a few investors. The actual fundraising of 500K happened after I moved here.
Who are actively involved in Reduce Data?
I am the solo founder of Reduce Data along with a 12 member team based of Mountain View, California. 3 team members are in the US and the rest 9 work out of Chennai, India. I also have several key advisors:
- Uzair Dada – CEO of Iron Horse Interactive (ironhorseinteractive.com)
- Suresh Mathai – CEO of Continuumglobal.com
- Sameer Sondhi – VP at Admarvel
- Rob Schoening – Consultant at Telegraph hill
How easy it was to get funded?
I think traction is important to get any kind of funding. Product, customers, references; all are really important. We want to be the #1 advertising analytics and optimization platform.
