Road to Predictability

— Mark Kahn June 25, 2007

An old and very dear friend and mentor of mine was often quoted as saying “you learn a lot more out there than you do in here.” His meaning, as I took it, was that getting in front of your potential customers to determine their wants and needs was always better than holing up in a conference room and making a good guess at it. I have never forgotten that bit of wisdom. So although all of us at TRAFFIQ bring our own real world experience to the world of buying and selling media, when we set about the business of building the TRAFFIQ exchange platform, we decided first to go “out there” to listen and learn more.

So what did we learn?

We learned that to offer real world value to our customers, what we are building is going to have to be far more than an ad network cloaking itself in hot industry buzzwords like “open,” “transparent,” and “exchange” (for an example of what I mean, see Jarod Caporino’s article on Transparency or Dan Ballister’s article: Is it an Exchange or a Network?)

No, using buzzwords was not going to be nearly enough. What we learned was that our TRAFFIQ exchange platform was going to have to deliver on the promise created by such buzzwords. More importantly, by being “out there” with the buyers and sellers of digital media, we learned what this community of experts had to tell us about what delivering on this promise really means.

An example of how this knowledge has translated into the development of the features of the TRAFFIQ exchange platform is this: we heard time and again there is an overwhelming need for greater predictability in the business of buying and selling digital media. For media sellers, there is a need to predict inventory sales days, weeks or months in advance, to avoid the last minute fire sales or worse yet, unsold ads. For media buyers, there is a need to secure inventory availability and to predict the cost of that inventory and its ROI. This resonated well with our own understanding of the issues facing the industry, as the entire TRAFFIQ team has, at one time or another, been a buyer or seller of digital media. But what we also heard was (and this is why my mentor’s saying still rings true), that this type of predictability was not enough. We learned there was a need to predict where an ad was going to appear, and that for our customers to be able to best plan their media sales and media buys, there was a need for clear, detailed listings of historical conversion rates and historical pricing, and complete detailed transactional data that would be available to all buyers and sellers on the TRAFFIQ Exchange.

We asked, we listened, we learned, and I am proud to say that when our first version of the TRAFFIQ Exchange platform is released in July, these needs for predictability will have been fully addressed.

Imagine a world in which your job, whether as a digital media buyer or a digital media seller, is not changed, but made easier, clearer and where results are far more predictable. This is what we are striving to build with the TRAFFIQ Exchange platform we are striving to build a predictable future.

Of course, TRAFFIQ will never be complete and we will never be satisfied. We are refining our product in real time with your help and you should come to expect that your comments and recommendations will always be heard because we will always be “out there,” listening.

As always, if you care to and have the time, please let us know your thoughts.

Best Regards

Mark Kahn
Chief Executive Officer
TRAFFIQ—The Internet Traffic Exchange