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Cannes Lions Interview: Jason Beckerman Co-Founder And CEO, Unified

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Unified

On the occasion of the 2017 Cannes Lions Creativity Festival, I sat down with the Co-Founder and CEO of Unified to discuss the state of marketing technology, social media advertising and his journey to CEO.

At 34, the Co-Founder and CEO of social advertising data management and business intelligence company Unified, Jason Beckerman, has been working on enterprise technology solutions since he was in his early teens.  Already adept at programming, Beckerman started working at Merrill Lynch when his mother took him to “Take Your Child to Work Day” at the wealth management firm when he was 16 years old. The tag-along led to a job of his own, building an early version of the firm’s intranet platform. “I couldn't even drive yet, so I took a car service to make sure I could capitalize on the opportunity to work at a huge company with a great mentor,” says Beckerman.

Beckerman’s early introduction to the world of business and his fascination with technology would eventually lead to an entrepreneur’s mindset — building solutions to meet the challenges and opportunities he saw around him. Unified was born out of that very mindset. Beckerman saw a common challenge facing nearly every organization that invests in advertising on social media: a lack of transparency, access and comprehension of the vast amount of data available and how it connects to performance. Today, the company is positioned as a data management and business intelligence platform, helping some of the industry’s biggest names to optimize their advertising investments across social media by providing a connected, cohesive view of their data sets. Headquartered in New York City, the company works with companies like ABInBev, Hershey's, and Honda is ramping towards 200 employees with offices in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Chicago.

“Unified aggregates social advertising investment data across all brands and geographic markets irrespective of what tool or team is leading the tactical execution.  We then enrich the data with the context of our customer's business. For example, if you're a CPG company and you have twenty different brand units, it's very likely you have decentralized activation in which different teams are executing different initiatives across different social media platforms in each geographical market. That creates data silos which typically means low visibility into execution, inconsistent reporting, and lack of data ownership. It's a very hard problem for most big enterprises to solve, and one that often leads to hundreds of millions of dollars wasted industry-wide. Unified provides a  seamless, efficient way to collect all of that data from countless parties touching millions  investment dollars into one place - all with very little change management to the actual buying process. We wanted to think bigger than the ad-tech category. We wanted to find a way to help our clients invest smarter in social media advertising. Our bet has been that owning the social advertising ecosystem would provide the right enterprise visibility to help the greater marketing and procurement office, given social advertising is where the majority of new digital dollars are going,” says Beckerman.

The company’s rapid expansion has been fueled by some $62 million in venture funding and debt financing from Advanced Publications, iHeartMedia, SVB, and Wellington Financial, among others, rather than the typical VC names from Sand Hill Road, owing to the media publishing world’s understanding of the disruption Unified could enact on an archaic marketing ecosystem.

Unified was started in 2011 out of Beckerman’s apartment. “A couple of us were working on running Facebook ad campaigns, and we recognized that there was going to be this huge social advertising ecosystem that would grow to need enterprise class sophistication,” says Beckerman.  He and his co-founders started Unified with the mission of applying technology to minimize wasted investment within the marketing office and proved the need for an enterprise platform by delivering best in class social advertising services. As Unified launched publicly in January of 2012, it was clear there would be great demand for an enterprise approach to the social advertising market so they chased it.

Looking for financing to grow the business, Beckerman had exhausted all of his options on Sand Hill Road without any takers. He then went to the Goldman Sachs Private Internet Conference and met Andrew Siegel. “Andrew immediately saw the vision we were chasing and bought in to our mission since day one,” says Beckerman.  Andrew led Unified’s Series A by putting $10 million of capital into the company alongside SVB providing receivable facilities. The cash infusion changed the trajectory of the company, not the least of which was moving the company out from Beckerman’s apartment into a headquarters on Madison Avenue where they have grown to multiple floors today. Additional funding came about through another serendipitous encounter at the Cannes Lions Creativity Festival in 2014.

“While in Cannes, I went to the iHeartMedia executive dinner where I met Joe Robinson, the head of corporate development at iHeartMedia. This was my first time in Cannes, and I am sure he could tell my excitement level was high. We talked about using first party data combined with social signals to deliver insights to transform the radio business. It was a perfect culture fit for us given the visionary support that would come from Joe, Bob Pittman, and Rich Bressler. Nine months later, they put $20 million into Unified along with a huge commercial partnership to develop the Unified audience intelligence solution. So, at this point none of our investors were strictly financial; they were all strategic partners in one way or another. This is a testament to our investors seeing us as a disruptor to the whole marketing ecosystem which is incredibly empowering in our day to day execution,” says Beckerman.

Though only 34, Beckerman has seen his share of success and failures prior to Unified. As a teenager, he went from working on the Merrill Lynch intranet to a start-up company, Paytrust, an early version of electronic bill pay for the financial services industry—where he worked on their call center technology infrastructure. It was the height of the dotcom bubble and he saw the company flounder through layoffs. “Seeing my co-workers sent home with cardboard boxes of office supplies at the age of 17 really impacted my viewpoint of how I wanted to progress my career, knowing I eventually would want to work for myself.”

From Paytrust, he went to Island ECN at 18, which was the first quantitative trading platform on Wall Street. “They would leverage the liquidity of their private marketplace to programmatically enable a stock transaction making fractions of pennies per trade. It was the first digital marketplace for stocks disrupting the old school methodology of people buying and selling through manual paper transactions on the floor of the stock exchange.  Today, I see it as a similar model to where the ad industry has been evolving from over the past couple of years,” says Beckerman referring to the mundane manual nature of insertion order processing over the programmatic ad buying world emerging today.

Beckerman finished his degree in entrepreneurship and computer science at Quinnipiac University, while simultaneously working for start-up, wealth management software company Albridge Solutions. “The amount of disparate raw data sets being aggregated and enriched to help financial advisors make better ROI decisions was an incredible learning experience. I was 21 at this point and implemented their entire CRM strategy.” The company was sold to PNC Bank for hundreds of millions of dollars in 2007. Though he was employee number 23, Beckerman did not participate in the spoils of the transaction as he moved on to the next chapter of his career joining Salesforce.com at 24 to launch the largest project in the history of the company at the time, back at Merrill Lynch where his first career began. “Working on a project as important as the Merrill Lynch deployment gave me unbelievable opportunity and access to some of the top leaders at Salesforce, including Marc Benioff himself. I look back fondly on that experience of really understanding what both scale and a top notch organizational culture look like.” Even with this incredible opportunity, after 8 years of working in financial services startups, Beckerman got an entrepreneurial itch of his own.

 “I was fascinated by what Facebook was doing as they opened their developer platform, and I was seeing all of this data they had access to being made available to partners. At that time, this sparked two ideas. I was going for my Master's in organizational leadership online at Gonzaga University, while working at Salesforce on the Merrill project. I realized obtaining that degree was very expensive for an online message board and a list of books to read. So I called my friend since sixth grade, Josh Backer, and said ‘Why don't we start an education marketplace where anyone can teach anything, and set their own price?,’” says Beckerman.

The idea was called “Teach the People”, and they would crowdsource the faculty and use Facebook to drive registrations. The idea was accepted to present at TechCrunch 40 in 2007 and was awarded the Facebook Fund grant in 2008. The idea was way ahead of its time and Sand Hill road investors panned the concept.

“At the same time we had Teach the People, which was a true passion project for both Josh and myself, we had a ‘drunken bar idea’ to build the first sweepstakes on Facebook, an advertising generated lottery. It went to 2 million users in two weeks, and Josh and I thought we were going to retire. Then overnight, the app disappeared from Facebook.”  Facebook decided to take the application off of the platform because it lacked proper sweepstakes rules that Beckerman and his partner never knew they needed. “It was the Wild West years of the Facebook Platform which came with the good and the bad. Unfortunately, once the app was re-enabled, we were never able to get back the viral mechanics that made the app initially take off.”

The business ultimately had a small exit to a Facebook ad network, and in the process they learned a great deal about how to effectively use Facebook to drive advertiser activity before the Ads API program formally opened. They shut down Teach the People and decided to tackle the emerging social advertising opportunity. “We knew all of the social ad networks and we knew all of the major gaming developers in the ecosystem. This is when virtual currency was really hot — and so we built a virtual currency ad network called Social Suitcase. We drove Facebook page likes and app installs for major brands and agencies and rewarded users with their favorite in-game currency. We then partnered with a company that built browser toolbars, called FreeCause, and launched a gaming toolbar brand through a JV called AppBar which was wildly successful signing customers like Mobwars, Zynga, and Causes.” FreeCause ended up getting acquired by Rakuten, and Josh and Jason continued to grow Social Suitcase, eventually exiting that business to one of the largest display ad networks in 2010 and in the process met their third Unified co-founder Sheldon Owen.

 “You live and you learn a lot along the way, especially through the failures even more than the wins. I've recognized, over time, that it's always important to keep marching forward with your ideas and take the opportunities ahead of you with a persistence the next person can't replicate,” says Beckerman. Given their experiences, the pair came to a realization. “We saw that most brands had no idea what they were buying when it came to advertising investment at large, especially in social. Brands outsourced all of their investment in social to agencies who subsequently outsourced the investment to a network of vendors of which the brand typically had no idea even existed. The amount of money being spent in the early days of social without any transparency into what was being bought was unbelievable to us,” says Beckerman. This lack of transparency and wasted investment for the world’s most loved brands provided inspiration for a whiteboard drawing which would change their lives: the initial architecture of the Unified Platform.

“The lack of transparency in the marketing ecosystem was just becoming largely apparent. Couple that with my background from Island ECN, Albridge and Salesforce, plus the recent firsthand experience Josh and I had in the social advertising world - it was this perfect storm of experience, knowledge and market need that became the foundation and vision for Unified,” says Beckerman. “In our opinion, we look very similar now to the early days of Salesforce.com, but built specifically for the global marketing office. Our goal is to be the company that becomes the clearing house for all social advertising investment, and we are the most well positioned company in the marketplace to do just that.”

With an estimated total addressable market of more than $50 billion just in the U.S. alone, the opportunities for Unified seem wide open.

“Our current position makes us an incredibly transformative company with a major growth opportunity ahead. Many of our investors think this is an IPO company if we continue to chase our mission of minimizing waste in the marketing supply chain to give that value back to the brands who deserve it,” says Beckerman.

 

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