Last week I was briefed on the new online advertising platform that Tumri is launching today. Flush with $16.5 million in investment and already well covered by business tech blogs, Tumri is building out a widget-based Merchandising Network that it hopes will be The Next Big Thing in online advertising – after Google Adsense. Tumri Advertiser aims to combine brand marketing with products and offers in a single advertising widget.
Essentially Tumri enables advertisers to build “AdPods”, which are e-commerce widgets. Publishers can then insert these widgets onto their websites, in the hope of earning money. The advantage for advertisers is that they can insert their brand into these widgets, which then get distributed across the Web. With the new Advertiser platform, Tumri says it gives more control to the advertiser – including controlling the brand and tracking performance. Tumri says that their platform enables advertisers to combine different merchandising feeds with branding, in their AdPods. The technology to do all of this is patent-pending and Tumri claims it is “differentiated technology in ad targeting and personalization”. Here is the process:
I was curious why Tumri is calling their product an AdPod, instead of just plain old ‘widget’ (which although ungainly, is at least an accepted term). Tumri told me that the capability of their AdPod is a lot richer than a normal widget; and the level of interactivity is more than other ads. I was also informed that AdPods can process feeds semantically too – e.g. promotions.
My next question was whether Tumri’s AdPods will eventually enable transaction processing from within the widget. Right now, consumers need to click through to the retailer’s website to complete a transaction (ref: number 7 in diagram above). Tumri told me that it is technologically not difficult to process transactions inside the widget, but there are issues around credit card processing which make it not do-able now.
Overall, Tumri aims to “increase the performance of advertising” for advertisers – meaning more data, better return on investment, more flexibility with branding, etc. What’s more, they claim to be able to do all of this on-the-fly. Advertisers on board already include Macy’s, Wal-Mart and Sears. It remains to be seen how Tumri’s product performs – the proof will be in the pudding for advertisers – but you have to admire Tumri’s ambition. And with $16.5M in funding already, they are putting a lot of money into this vision.
Here are some initial screenshots. What do you think of Tumri’s product?
