Introducing Clickable Platform

When we started Clickable, we made a business decision to only create products or features that deliver measurable ROI, either by saving you time or by making you more profitable. With this disciplined approach, we’ve been developing our next product quietly for nearly a year, and we are excited to share Clickable Platform with you today. Clickable Platform is the first white-label solution that allows online advertising resellers to rapidly scale online advertising and lead-generation programs profitably to a full continuum of local businesses—from a local advertiser’s first dollar to a large enterprise customer’s million-dollar campaign.   It’s already built, and, with the help of key partners, manages online advertising for over 2000 customers.

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