Recently checked in with appssavvy Founder Chris Cunningham after the company secured its Series A round of funding. Below, you'll find his answers to our questions, part of our Q&A series with people of note in the media and technology space in the tri-state area.
Q: How will you be using the money secured in your Series A round of funding?
Early last month, appssavvy announced $3.1 million in
Series A funding led by TRUE Ventures. In addition, Scott Kurnit, founder of
About.com, also participated in the round of financing.
While very exciting, the funding will enable us to further
what we’ve had great success in building this year and that’s a savvy,
experienced and creative direct sales team to connect social media applications
developers and publishers with leading brands and advertising agencies.
Our Series A funding will enable us to continue tofocus on the core assets to our
business model of building-out a world class sales and marketing team; establishing
relationships with social media application developers and publishers, and
brands and agencies; and leveraging and developing tools and technologies
specific to furthering the success of social media application marketing.
Q: Why is appssavvy located in New York City rather than Silicon
Valley? Has being located here presented the company with
any unique challenges in terms of hiring or finding office space?
I’m an East Coast guy, but more
importantly New York
is the advertising capital of the world. At the core (no “Big Apple” pun
intended) of what appssavvy is does is deliver contextually-relevant marketing
opportunities for leading brands and agencies and the advertisers they
represent, tap into social media applications, found on Facebook and other
social networks. So, it makes sense for us to be a New York City-based company
as we’re able to walk out of offices and meet with many of the largest in the
world. Now, however, our goal is to monetize the social media application road
between Madison Avenue and Silicon Valley, so
we do have teammates, both appssavvy employees and developer and publisher
partners, on the West Coast.
All in all, we’re very proud to be a New
York City-based company and while finding great people, not to mention office
space, is often difficult, we’ve been very fortunate. We’ve had great success
finding the players that makes up our direct sales and marketing team. I
believe we’ve had success because we’re on the cutting edge of a burgeoning
interactive marketing channel. Lastly, we just moved into new offices on
Broadway and look forward to welcoming clients and friends to our new digs
early next month.
Q: Where are appssavvy’s developers
located?
While we do develop custom
applications, our focus is on working with the developers and publishers of the
tens of thousands of social media applications found on Facebook and
increasingly on other social media properties. Currently, we are working with
more than 100 partners that have developed more than 500 social media
applications. These developers are spread out with a heavy focus in the San
Francisco Bay-area. We often talk about building a bridge between Madison
Avenue and Silicon Valley. Thus, we have a
direct sales team in the Bay-area serving developer and publishers, not to
mention advertisers and agencies. In addition to the Bay-area, we’re seeing a
lot of development work in this space in Los Angeles, Chicago and Toronto.
Q: Has the recent economic downturn
affected appssavvy’s business?
We are very cognizant of what’s going on in the marketplace and do keep an eye on it, but our focus is on a rapidly emerging marketing channel for advertisers and that is social media applications. Social media has the potential to connect marketers with
consumers in extraordinary ways. Our team is doing that every day in incredibly
creative, but most importantly, relevant ways This is what we are focused on,
amid the financial storm we’re all in together. We are well positioned in the
new space of social media applications through partnerships with 15 of the top
25 applications on Facebook, for example, not to mention more than 100
developers and publishers of more than 500 applications in all.
Q: What does appssavvy offer its clients
that other advertising networks don’t?
Most importantly, appssavvy is not an
ad network. The traditional ad network model is to partner with hundreds, if
not thousands of Web sites, and an advertiser can then come buy media and
spread their ads around these sites randomly or in a targeted fashion.
appssavvy doesn’t work that way. We are a
direct sales team focused on connecting an advertiser with an application in a
meaningful way. We are strong believers
in doing so in a contextually-relevant way. For example, for adidas we connected
the brand with a sneakers social media application. For Sony Pictures we tied
the release of its movie Made of Honor with a Wedding Book application
sponsorship. Lastly, for the department store Kohl’s we created a custom
application that fit into its Back to School campaign.
In addition to these sponsorships,
through our relationships with developers of more than 500 applications, we’ve
created vertical channels, such as entertainment, sports, casual gaming and
more than a dozen others for advertisers to target and drive awareness of the
social media applications they are sponsoring. In all, this year we’ve proven our
business model ramping revenues quickly by building that bridge between social
media application developers and publishers with leading brands and agencies.
Our foundation is solid, but there’s much more to do and we couldn’t be any
more excited about where we are and where we are going.
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