Tracking digital ad campaigns is a piece of cake, according to Accelerize Inc.—its own Cake, that is.
The Newport Beach-based marketing technology company recently rebranded its sole division, Cake, in an effort to attract larger accounts and “uplist” to Nasdaq from trading over the counter.
Cake’s new look, developed by San Diego-based agency Grizzly Inc., included updates to its logo and website that were launched Sept 29.
“We didn’t want to be cute anymore,” Accelerize Chief Operating Officer Santi Pierini said of Cake’s slice-like old logo. “We wanted to balance the enterprise look and feel of our firm.”
The new logo looks like half of a bundt-style cake.
Cake tracks digital marketing campaigns deployed through its “software-as-a-service” platform and, when needed, provides users with real-time data to help optimize spending for marketing.
It follows about 5 billion consumers’ interactions with advertisers’ offers each month across multiple marketing channels, such as mobile devices, social media, video, paid search results, email campaigns, and coupon-shopping sites.
It can tell if an email from a retailer was opened by a targeted shopper or if a prospective traveler has purchased a flight or abandoned the booking process midway. The information helps advertisers identify parts of their campaigns that are working and others that may need tweaking.
“If we can tell you that entire story, we can tell you how to better optimize that digital spend,” said David Stewart, Accelerize’s chief technology officer.
Tracking the effectiveness of digital marketing in real time isn’t new, but Cake’s ability to consolidate responses from various campaign components into one dashboard regardless of the marketing channels the campaign was promoted on is what separates Cake from the rest of the pack, Stewart said.
Google Inc., for example, provides Cake-like analytics tools to advertisers in its own ecosystem but won’t do the same for marketing campaigns with media buys on Microsoft Corp.’s Bing search engine, he said.
“We are an unbiased third party that can tell you which did better so you can adjust your media spend and optimize.”
Clients, Growth
Cake’s roster of 450 clients includes Experian PLC in Costa Mesa, Local Corp. in Irvine, and Mindspark Interactive Network Inc. in Yonkers, N.Y.
Accelerize, founded in 2007, generates income from one-time implementation and training fees and a monthly license fee. Its revenue last year was $9.7 million, and it’s on track to exceed that by about 70%, according to Pierini—Accelerize reported $7.3 million in revenue for the six-month period ended June 30, a 66% jump over the same period last year. Its client base increased 52% in the first half of this year, and its average revenue per client rose 10%, according to a recent filing the company made with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Hires
The growth enabled Accelerize to hire 40 employees this year, nearly doubling its workforce to 85, split between its headquarters off Birch Street in Newport Beach and additional offices in Santa Monica, New York and London.
The public company has a market value of about $75 million and about 700 shareholders, the largest of which is Accelerize’s Chairman and Chief Executive Brian Ross.
It spent a significant portion of its revenue—$3.5 million in the first half of the year—on promoting its services.
“People are moving from traditional media to digital media,” Pierini said. “The market opportunity was so large, we didn’t want to miss it by being conservative.”
Accelerize has increased its presence at trade shows; grown its marketing department from one employee to seven; and is investing in digital advertising, including pay-per-click, display ads, and sponsored articles.
It reported a $706,487 loss in the most recent quarterly filing, a result of a strategy that is “not out of control,” Pierini said.
“We are operating within constraints. … We have to invest to uplist to Nasdaq. Once we uplist, we’ll revisit profitability.”
