With our patented technology we’re catalyzing digital co-op innovation.
From 2013–2015 Adamatic, led by company founder Jordan Bentley, focused on selling ads to publishers in the automotive space. The company saw success in the automotive market, but as they grew Bentley and his team realized the auto market was not as large as they had initially thought. They knew it was time to expand. “As the company grew and evolved, we saw a new opportunity to take what we had been doing in automotive, make some minor changes, and use our technology in a different manner,” Bentley says.
Those minor changes and different use of technology led the Adamatic team to a new specific focus: Cooperative advertising that helps brand manufacturers and their retailers. With that new focus came a new name, brand, and CEO. Adamatic Inc. became Muster Media, and advertising veteran Rhett Frandsen became Muster CEO in December of 2015. Having spent the previous nine years in the ad tech industry, Frandsen was able to recognize Muster’s potential to make a big impact with its strong technical foundation, and he was able to recognize Bentley as a competent founder that could take the company where it needed to go. “A true partnership is key to success,” Frandsen says, citing his partnership with Bentley.
But before there was the promising partnership, Muster Media, or even Adamatic, there was just a college kid with an internet connection. Bentley, who was studying engineering at the time, wondered how much it would cost to install a pool in a backyard sometime in the very distant future. So he did a quick Google search, and the ad model, as it was at the time, kicked into gear and served Bentley, a college student with no backyard, nothing but ads for backyard pools. “Like a lot of consumers, I was online a lot and was served a lot of ads online, but none of them had to do with my interests,” Bentley says. Bentley realized that while consumers are sharing a good deal of information about what they are interested in, advertisers are not looking at that information holistically. In other words, advertisers are trying to sell backyard pools to college freshman.
Bentley decided to take a different approach to advertising that was centered around relevancy. This approach logs and stores more granular details about consumers, and those consumers are served ads that are relevant to their interests. Those ads are 280% more engaging than traditional ads. “With our patented technology we’re catalyzing digital co-op innovation.,” Bentley says. For every ad served, Muster calculates a relevancy score. The purpose of this score is two fold: 1. to provide advertisers with a report, and 2. to determine what can change to improve an ad’s relevancy. It’s a predictive model that advertisers love. So much so, that Adamatic has never lost a client. “As Muster continues to gain speed we expect that [customer satisfaction] to continue,” Bentley says.
Gaining speed is something Muster is sure to do with their new focus. While co-op advertising is a giant market, very few co-op ads make it to the digital market. Consumers are accustomed to ads that bring two retailers together in more traditional marketing mediums that benefit regional retailers (think your local paper running an ad that announces the local supermarket carrying a certain brand). Muster is solving that problem by building products that will take cooperative advertising to the digital world and benefit advertisers globally.
Bentley is a Boom Startup graduate and he and Frandsen have nothing but praise for the Utah Startup environment. “What’s unique about Utah is this idea of possibility,” Frandsen says. “There’s an association of empowerment and enablement.”
Published 2/15/2016
