Clickable Platform enables our partners and their direct sales organizations to rapidly deploy online advertising programs to thousands of businesses under their own brand. Platform is designed to acquire and grow customers, set and deliver on expectations transparently, and defeat local-business customer churn.  Clickable Platform delivers all the necessary components for local-advertising success, including lead generation, self-manage advertising tools, managed-assist services, reporting, full customer support, launch training, community, billing (eight currencies and 120 Countries) and full CRM integration.

NYM is a special partner because we are combining two proprietary assets: the New York Magazine franchise and our Clickable Platform local-marketing technology.  It’s important to note that brands, incumbency and trusted relationships with local businesses represent half of the equation in building a successful local-advertising business. Technology represents the other half, and that’s where we’ll continue to innovate and lead.  We’re enabling partners like NYM to succeed with a complete performance-marketing solution that allows them to scale their local-advertising business from the first dollar to the millionth – all on one, simple experience. It’s the only one-stop shop on which to grow a full continuum of local-business customers, and we’re excited about it. This is just one of many Clickable Platform local partnerships you’ll hear about in 2010.

Importantly, we have an aggressive product roadmap, including integrations with leading social, mobile and real-time networks. We’re also developing experiences on both desktop and mobile-device environments. And all of these investments and innovations are driven by a clear purpose: to help businesses survive and thrive by simplifying online advertising success. That purpose inspired our first line of code, and it continues to forge every aspect of our culture and the products we build with our customers. That dedication and focus is proprietary to Clickable.

Please let us know if you’d like to learn more about Clickable Platform. We look forward to sharing many more successes in 2010.

At the center of our product development has been the extraordinary technology and business vision of my co-founder Munish Gandhi. I am deeply grateful to Munish and the product team for putting us in a place to attract such amazing customers, partners and, most importantly, incredible talent.

As Clickable enters the next chapter of growth, we are proud to introduce a new partner in our effort to bring disruptive simplicity and scale to our market. Today, we are proud to introduce Dave Fall as our Senior Vice President of Product and Operations. As I shared in the news release, Dave has a rare mix of technical, advertising, sales and operations expertise that directly contributed to DoubleClick and Google’s success. Dave’s talent works directly in concert with our market positioning, and most importantly, Clickable’s Culture.

Attracting incredible talent is a requirement of any emerging growth company. In fact, people are the core factor in all disproportional market winners. We’re dedicated to building Clickable into a disproportional winner – and, now, with Dave.

Dave: We all welcome you, and your positive impact, personally and professionally.

Finally, I’d like to share below a short video introduction with Dave, which Max shot earlier this week.

As we developed Clickable Platform, our local advertising technology, we became intimate with market friction hindering the growth of local search advertising. To better understand the challenges and opportunities, we commissioned Borrell Associates, a research and consulting firm that tracks local ad spending, to study the economics. We released this seminal report last week. (You can download the full report here.)

Borrell conducted their research independently to drive objectivity and transparency, and explore new areas beyond our own core technology focus. They delivered with an important insight: high customer dissatisfaction is driving high customer attrition.

Importantly, Borrell reported that Clickable addresses half the problem at this phase of market maturation with scalable technology that delivers meaningful ROI. The other half of the solution: local advertising resellers must properly manage customer expectations around the purpose and value of search advertising. The two must work in concert.

We since have received encouraging feedback, and prompted constructive debate. Thanks to all who’ve responded publicly or privately. Below are additional perspectives since the research has circulated widely.

• Guiding Next Phase Of Local Online Advertising: Our intent was to strengthen the performance of search advertising for local businesses. After collecting feedback from our partners and other insiders across the local advertising industry, we believe the research prompted an overdue industry-wide discussion of online advertising economics. The research has already been downloaded thousands of times, shared many more times, and received coverage in some of the most important news outlets and analyst blogs. It is helping to redirect the course of the next phase of local online advertising.
• An Accurate Barometer: The overwhelming reaction was that the research was an accurate barometer of the marketplace, validating disparate, internal accounts. It provided local-advertising executives with critical perspective on the challenges and opportunities of creating and growing more profitable local online advertising service businesses. In fact, the report already has become an important internal strategic marketing tool, according to dozens of feedback messages from executives at major local media companies.
• Some Confusion: Because of the sensitive nature of customer attrition for reseller businesses, Borrell interviewed a wide range of company representatives and kept their identities and companies confidential. This was an effective and valid method to obtain data that are otherwise difficult to surface. With high annual churn rates revealed, we weren’t surprised to see some resellers quietly acknowledge them, while others challenged them. In nearly every challenge, we surfaced a misunderstanding between average monthly churn rates and annual churn rates. Specifically, Borrell’s research examined annual churn rates — that is, the number of customers in a year who will remain customers the following year. Most industry insiders immediately acknowledged that Borrell’s numbers were norm, and not far from their own.

As always, we welcome your feedback and added commentary.

As we developed Platform over the past year, we became intimate with market forces that are hindering the growth and long-term sustainability of the local search advertising industry. To better understand the challenges and shed light on the opportunities, we’re thrilled to release today a new research report authored by Borrell Associates, a research and consulting firm that tracks local ad spending. We commissioned this analysis of the economics of local online advertising to help strengthen the performance of search advertising for small and local businesses.

We’d love your feedback on this research, which you can download for free. We present many conclusions and insights, and we’re extremely interested in your frontline feedback to incorporate into the products we build for our own customers and partners.

Key findings from the Borrell Associates report:

• Local Search Advertising Is A Massive Opportunity: Locally placed search advertising in the U.S. is projected to grow 30 percent over the next five years, from $4.1 billion in 2008 to $5.3 billion in 2013.
• Winners Will Adopt Scalable Technology And Recalibrate Their Economics: This growth will be led primarily by advertising service providers that adopt scalable technology infrastructure and recalibrate their economics to allocate more customer investment to search media spend.
• Customer Churn Is A Major Challenge: Many online advertising resellers and affiliates, who service local businesses, churn half their customers within a year’s time, and some lose as many as 90 percent. This often is due to missed expectations and a lack of return on investment for local-business customers.
• Success Requires ROI, Easily Understood: Critical points for local advertising success include correctly pricing advertising products for local businesses, and devoting a greater percent of their investment to advertising on their behalf. Most important, advertising products and value must be easily understood by local businesses. That requires a shift from selling Web site clicks to selling measurable leads and phone calls.
• Tools, Simple Reporting and ROI Central: Affiliates and resellers of search advertising who do not invest in sophisticated technologies will continue to see high levels of customer attrition. In response, new affiliates and resellers who optimize and scale SEM advertising performance through simple software tools and reporting – that clearly communicate and deliver value – will be poised to capture a larger share of the local advertising marketplace.
• Managing Customer Expectations, Retention & Up-Selling Key To Growth: The most successful local search advertising service companies will not only manage expectations through simple reporting and greater ROI, but by migrating customers to higher average monthly media spends.

Again, the report is downloadable for free, and we’d love to hear your feedback in the comments section below. And if you’re interested in learning more about our Platform and partner program, you can contact us here.

This is important because Clickable Platform was designed to solve the problem of creating, deploying and managing advertising for thousands of customers simultaneously, which usually results in complexity, inefficiency, and poor performance. This commonly results in devastating churn.  Clickable Platform solves the local performance marketing problem by integrating all three of our core products: Pro, Leads, and Assist. Collectively, they deliver value from day one, and mature customers from beginners to professional online advertisers. Clickable Platform is an incredible technical accomplishment that we are all proud of. It marks the expansion of Clickable’s focus for small and midsize businesses seeking simplicity and profitability, wherever in the market they participate: Local, Small, Medium or Enterprise. See our news release for specific product details.

Context is key: Since I last communicated with you in our 2009 outlook, the advertising market has continued to deteriorate, particularly analog formats and, in the online world, display. We still witness an active flight to performance-based marketing, with a disproportionate shift into search marketing.   Perhaps the most important thing we’ve learned is:  Advertising budgets do not directly correlate to the type of product or service an advertiser requires or desires. Both the enterprise and the local markets are filled with services that are misaligned with advertisers’ goals and expectations, and products that are filled with features and complexities that simply don’t drive return. The result is neutral to negative advertising performance, and churn.  This is the market problem Clickable Platform solves: it meets the advertiser’s goal along many points in the continuum of their needs – and it performs.

Beyond today’s announcement, Clickable continues to grow rapidly and meet our high expectations. We released Clickable Pro 2.0, our self-manage advertising dashboard, in February. In a few weeks we will release 2.1, and it will include several major reporting and recommendation-engine upgrades. We like to say that Clickable is relevant to all advertisers that want the simplest path to profitability. Evidence of this includes such customers as eNanny Source, Guidant Financial Group and many agencies of all sizes both domestic and international.  Clickable Assist is one of the fastest growing areas of our business, helping dozens of companies a month successfully launch or re-launch their online advertising efforts. Clickable Leads continues to power the lead generation efforts of several partners including Lexis Nexis and, more recently, a hotly contested win with Franchise Company Solutions.  We have many new partnerships we intend to announce in 2009 as well.

For the balance of 2009, we will focus on scaling and perfecting our three core products, building out our direct and partner sales channels, and scaling our customer support experience. In my experience with start-ups, it takes nearly three years to really know and understand your market and to determine what kind of company you are building. The third anniversary of Clickable’s first line of code is this coming September, and the esteem and confidence in our culture is building. We are already excited about 2010 and beyond.

I will close the same way I always do. It’s a reminder that we have not lost sight of our central cultural value: The 7:1 Rule. For those who have not heard it (no one at Clickable…), it’s the ratio of positive to negative that we aspire to meet everyday. Put simply:  we try to do extraordinarily more positive than we do negative. It’s a nearly unobtainable equation, and that’s the point. We are not perfect, nor are any products or companies in any market. We recognize this, and our customers and our team do as well. Our boldest, and perhaps most humble, claim is that no company has more energy, drive, resources and positive intentions in making you successful in online advertising than Clickable.  We hope this is always your experience with us.

Warm regards,

David

http://bit.ly/UU5Bb

Here is our New World Order:

From: Things NOT People
To: People NOT Things

About: The Teresa Carreño Youth Orchestra contains the best high school musicians from Venezuela’s life-changing music program, El Sistema. Led here by Gustavo Dudamel, they play Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 10, 2nd movement, and Arturo Márquez’ Danzón No. 2.

I’ll be frank: for everyone at Clickable, 2008 was simply exhausting, if often exhilarating. We completed the commercial release of Clickable Pro and Clickable Community; launched Clickable Assist, our premium full-service team; released Clickable Conversion Tracking; implemented our first Clickable Express partnership with LexisNexis; and closed our Series B round of financing with our incredible venture partners, Union Square Ventures, FirstMark and The Founders Fund. All along, we made improvements to every one of our products based on customer feedback. It is a testament to the energy, intellect and passion of our team that we were able to achieve all of this.

As mentioned, we “released” many new products and features into the market in the past year. But the truth, as Marc Andreessen so accurately put it, is that the market ripped those products and services out of us. Everything we’ve done has been a response to two very basic questions: What are the most demanding problems facing our customers? And how can we help them solve those problems simply and profitably? Whatever our original intentions and goals may have been, our actual product roadmap has been determined by what the market ― you, our customers ― demands of us.

We were reminded of this throughout 2008 by a pleasant surprise: many of our customers had much higher ad spend than we’d originally been targeting. Our goal in launching Clickable was to bring simplicity to search marketing for small and mid-sized businesses. We didn’t set out to capture the “enterprise” market. As we saw it at the beginning of the year, the key distinction between those two markets was the complexity of their goals, and we thought that “enterprise” customers were operating at a level of complexity that was outside of our scope. As it happens, those clients value simplicity as much as any others, and they found that simplicity in Clickable’s tools.

With this perspective in mind, any discussion about our plans for 2009 is, of course, provisional. Some things won’t change: Clickable Pro will continue making it simpler to manage search advertising, including more accounts, larger keyword sets and more campaigns. We’ll continue helping our customers optimize their ad campaigns to specific revenue goals, and track performance with custom reports driven by independent and consistent measurement. Clickable Assist will continue to augment our customers’ internal marketing efforts with our premium team of search marketing professionals. And our support team will continue to help our customers on email, on Live Chat and on our 800 line. They will strive to resolve all customer challenges and inquiries within 24 hours.

As important as all of this is, the over 60 members of our dedicated product team won’t be satisfied with incremental improvements. They will continue to launch significant new releases. As early as February, Clickable will be the first fully compliant tool using Google’s new API, with support for search, image, mobile and local business campaigns. In late Q1, we plan to release a full agency feature set, including better bulk management features, campaign cloning features and comprehensive reporting systems, all with white-label capabilities. Later in the year, we’ll integrate new vertical advertising networks, including new formats such as social media and display exchanges.

Of course, we recognize we are entering 2009 in a very different and challenging economic environment. Odd as it sounds, I believe Clickable is not only well positioned despite the general market environment, but because of it. With an impending recession, advertisers are demanding that their marketing investments drive specific and targeted economic goals. In the coming months, there will be more realignment of traditional advertising dollars to more measurable investments―especially search marketing. This is not to say that search marketing will be unaffected: the focus on performance will mean that even new search advertisers will optimize for profit rather than clicks, a fundamental shift. This is happening at a time when the complexity of search marketing is overtaking the competence of even experienced online advertisers. Search marketers, new and old, will seek to reduce complexity and costs, and they’ll need to do so quickly.

Fortunately, we predicted the migration to performance even before the economic downturn, and we built Clickable Pro and our other products to account for it. This is evidenced by core functionality like “Goal-Based” recommendations and our online advertising conversion-tracking tool. And from the day we began Clickable, simplicity has been our primary goal. (Every employee is given a “WWAD” ― “What Would Apple Do?” ― bracelet when they start.)

Most importantly, everything we do will continue in collaboration with our customers. There will always be a place for Clickable in tomorrow’s market, because tomorrow’s market will determine what Clickable is and will be.

I’d like to close by thanking our early customers, our partners, and the Clickable team. You are our founding stakeholders, and the primary shapers of our culture. That culture is a unique one: we strive to do extraordinarily more good than bad. It’s our 7:1 rule, the ratio of positive to negative that we aspire to meet every day. It’s nearly unobtainable, and that’s the point. But that “1” on the right side always reminds us that we’re not perfect, and that we need to solicit and listen to your advice about how we can improve. When we fail, we want you to tell us, so we can confront the problem, resolve it, and move forward―very, very quickly. Our boldest claim at Clickable is that no company has more resources, energy or desire to make you a successful search marketer. We just need you to tell us what we’re doing right, and what we can be doing better. So please let us know.

Munish and I are deeply grateful to be part of building Clickable with all of you, and we wish you great fortune in 2009.

Warm regards,
David
Co-Founder and CEO, Clickable, Inc.

Carlos Lascano (Argentina – 1973) is a multi-faceted artist who has successfully made incursions into Painting, Illustration and Comics. He finally decided that filmmaking was his medium of choice because it represented the coming together of the different forms of expression of his artistic universe. In 1997, he completed Law School, but decides not to practice. His artistic vocation has completely captivated him. He founded his own production company that same year: “Pandemonium visual group”, which produced publicity for television. His trajectory in the art world speaks for itself. He has filmed video clips, commercial ads, animation, documentaries and feature films. His work like animation director for “The legend of the Scarecrow” won more than 21 international prizes including Best animation in L.A. short film Festival, Chicago, Leeds, and was preselected for the Oscars

It is with great pride that today we are announcing our first Clickable enterprise partnership. LexisNexis and Clickable have partnered to offer an end-to-end Internet marketing solution for law firms interested in lead generation using online paid search techniques.  We’ve built a highly scalable platform that delivers completely white-labeled services that include: legal search engine marketing expertise; instant activation and results; analytics, optimization and reporting.

Clickable is transforming lead generation for small and midsize businesses with the first solution to make search marketing simple.  This venture with LexisNexis, a global information provider, demonstrates the simplicity, scale and effectiveness in which Clickable can enable premium industry service providers and agencies to build their own SEM businesses.  This partnership follows Clickable’s recent $14.5 million series B funding, which we’re using to accelerate Clickable’s momentum as the preeminent advertising solution for small and midsize marketers.

We have the good fortune of working with a highly talented team inside Clickable, but it’s important to credit the imagination and directional thinking of the LexisNexis team in launching this solution. We’re honored to be working with their talented search team.

We strive to be disciplined and deliberate with our communications to the market. You won’t see us make a monthly cadence of self-important news on small product features, conference attendance or speaking, or tertiary news coverage. However, you’ll continue to see a pattern of meaningful actions: partnerships, products and awards that illustrate we have moved from a great idea to a reality.

As always, we’ll continue to work closely with our community of customers and partners to transform online advertising on the core tenet of simplicity. We look forward to achieving that vision with you.

Warm regards,

David, Clickable Co-Founder, CEO

There are many factors that prevent startups from discovering market potential: macro market uncertainties; deep founder and investor biases (i.e. chasing science projects or egos); late customer acquisition and market testing; lack of transparency; failure to identify and follow your customers down an optimized product roadmap leading to real revenues; and, finally, a lack of funding.

In an early-stage company, the founders’ roles are to set the strategic vision, and walk directly into market, product, customer and organizational conflict and friction. It’s also the founders’ roles to drive transparency and accountability into every role and function, and keep the lights on. As we considered the macro-market environment for the next 18 to 24 months, we decided to aggressively take this last risk off the table by finding the best funding partners to accomplish our goal: solving online advertising complexity. We found these ideal partners in Union Square Ventures, FirstMark Capital (Formerly Pequot Ventures) and, now, The Founders Fund. Our investors have proven tremendous foresight by serving as the initial investors in Facebook, LinkedIn, Slide, StubHub, Massive, Etsy, Geni, Tacoda, Twitter, Ironport, Meetup, Quantcast, Zygna, Powerset, Del.icio.us, and Livegamer among many others.  We are honored to be one of the portfolio companies of this elite group of investors.

So how do we intend to deploy this capital? It’s simple: to disrupt the conversation in the market from one of complexity, to one of simplicity. We intend to deploy our capital to the exclusive benefit of our paying customers to whom we passionately listen, and follow their voice down a disciplined and rapid path of product innovation and execution.  Clickable is polarizing the market on this thesis of simplicity and development speed – and we are only gaining momentum. See our news release on the funding, issued today.

To all of our customers, partners, advisors, stakeholders and friends, thank you for your past contributions and ongoing support. We’re humble and always listening to your feedback so we can constantly improve and ensure our collective success.

David S. Kidder
Clickable CEO and Co-Founder