Transitiv Tabulates Your Marketing ROI

Transitiv (previously Thermatic I.O.) helps you look beyond impressions and clicks when studying your digital advertising campaigns. The MarTech software wants to simplify your startup’s data and help you engage more users. The platform arms marketers with Transitiv’s Thermatic measurement technology, which uses collected data to build models from the ground up and nail down the most effective use of ad dollars.

CEO Ashley Messer led a successful rebranding this past summer. Thanks to Microsoft’s BizSpark Plus program, he is now ready to expand beyond early adopters and invite agencies and MarTech companies to try out the software. “Our platform leapfrogs the old dying tech and focuses on leveraging the new open formats that publishers and advertisers are adopting en masse,” says Messer.

Messer shares more on Transitiv’s innovative revenue model and how they can boost your company’s data science ROI.

Funding or bootstrapped: 

transitiv-ashleymesser-headshotWe’re well capitalized and not looking for funding right now. We closed a small angel round earlier this year. However, our first significant funding-related accomplishment was actually a nod from Microsoft, who awarded us over 120K in cloud computing grants and access to tons of software via their BizSpark Plus program. This early win allowed us to ramp up and hit the early milestones we needed to close our angel round quickly. We’ve since leveraged this grant to build a robust platform that easily scales to tens of thousands of requests per second, with real time reporting capabilities. Non-traditional, zero-equity-cost resources like this are available from a variety of sources and are often overlooked by early-stage entrepreneurs.

The fact that we’re funded is allowing us to offer our technology at a steep discount for early adopters. The response has been great so far, and we’re looking for more agencies and MarTech companies to jump on board.

What’s your pitch?

Our core mission is to help digital marketers leverage all of their data assets for maximum effect. Brands are investing in analytical talent (data science/machine learning) more than ever before, often with the purpose of using some blend of proprietary data to give their marketing a boost. However, they face two serious challenges: one, when collecting and cleaning their data it often takes more than 80 percent of their time and two, when they build a model and go use it, they’re stuck because most AdTech platforms are built on legacy tech from the late 90’s and there’s simply no way to effectively plug their model into the ad serving process.

Transitiv solves the data collection cleaning problem. We provide an easy-to-use closed loop of data collection, measurement, and model-based ad serving. This gives brands, agencies, and MarTech companies the ability to get a meaningful ROI from the investment in data science resources. We give marketers and their analytics teams an advantage over their competition. 

What problem are you solving?

Digital advertising is incredibly complex and this natural complexity drives advertisers to focus on simple metrics like impressions and clickthrough-rate. While these metrics form a reasonable basis for analysis, they often mask what advertisers are ultimately interested measuring — engagement! 

The Transitiv platform allows marketers and their data science teams to build models from the ground up using data that we’ve collected on their behalf as well as their own data and then use those models for ad serving. Finally our measurement technology Thermatic™ allows them to get performance feedback to iterate and tune their models for maximum effectiveness.

Anyone that’s ever wanted more transparency and more control in what ad serves to whom, when and where/in what context is an ideal customer for us.  

transitiv-graphRevenue Model:  

Our revenue model is different from the typical companies in our space.  Most companies in our space charge either on a cost per creative, or a percentage of spend. We want our partners to collect analytics on everything they traffic, and to do that we needed a pricing model that makes it a no-brainer to use Transitiv everywhere, without blowing the budget.

So, we came up with a pricing model that is CPM (cost per thousand impressions) based. Customers use the Transitiv platform on as many campaigns/creatives as they like.  Since we measure engagement in real time this model fits perfectly with how our costs grow.

Who are your competitors at the moment?

Typical competitors that get mentioned in context with us are listed in LUMAscape. However, most of those firms cater almost exclusively to large advertisers and/or large agency-holding companies. They have price points that make them inaccessible for boutique agencies that cater to small and medium-sized businesses.

Most importantly though, our competitors are “point solutions” that lack the ability to provide a closed loop system to build data science driven campaigns.

How does ATL weave into your story?

As a community, ATL has a great pool of tech talent, combined with low office rents, and a general positivity that is hard to match in any other startup market. We’re based here in ATL instead of NYC or SFBA because of these unique factors. We’re based out of Strongbox West and one of the first things I noticed there was a quote on the wall that says, “We don’t like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out.”  –Decca Records, when declining to sign the Beatles.

As a hobbyist musician, this quote struck me because it reminded me of conversations with friends ‘in the business’ on the coasts — none of them seemed to “get it.”  In contrast, whenever I talked to someone here in ATL about what I wanted to build the response was along the lines of, “when do you think it’ll be available,” or “that would be super helpful, I want to use it.” I didn’t really expect this going in, but it’s been great to be a part of this community.