In the Backbeat column, Ashish Shah, CEO & Founder, Vertoz Media talks about the need to keep evolving and changing constantly as it is difficult to predict the future of the online advertising industry
In today’s technologydriven world, everything is changing rapidly. One fundamental change is the ubiquity of technology. Nowadays, before we start on anything, we go online to find out about it, on what we need to do and how to do it. This wasn’t the scenario in the 90s. The technology industry was still nascent. To learn something new or start a new business was the biggest challenge, as hardly any knowledge resources were available.
I along with my brother had initiated an e-mail service business called indiafreemail. com. Our motive was to help people send messages to their families across the country and vice versa through e-mail, as telegrams and letters would take a long time to reach. Online advertising was something we stumbled across while doing this business. We used to wonder how ads on a website would generate revenue. But eventually we had to ditch it as people were not much familiar with technology.
Then, we started a domain registration and hosting services company. It was still new in India and I was young and needed to know more before I tried out anything. The market grew to great heights and the demand increased, so did our enthusiasm to get into this industry. We knew that traditional forms of advertising still had great impact, but times were changing and people were adapting to the evergrowing technology.
Indian society has always been open to try out new things and since then, Internet advertising has seen exponential growth. It has created many opportunities and helped people to find a place for themselves. Start-ups in this space have provided a platform for youth to learn about new technology and methods of working smartly.
The concept of a start-up cropped up a while back and provided people with opportunity to convert their ideas into reality. It was a challenge that every dreamer was ready to accept to create a name for himself. The enthusiasm driven by technological impact of online advertising in the market led us to establish our own online advertising startup, Vertoz, in 2012.
The idea of starting an ad network was to tap the huge international market, and to make Vertoz the buzzword for people in the online advertising industry. The online opportunity helped us gain access to customers from various countries across the world, including developed countries like the US. While we evolved, we saw the ups and downs in the market, we lived it and learnt from it. What keeps us going is the ability to adapt and accept failure as it comes, as failures helped us find solutions and grow, to create an identity in the international market and provide services to everyone everywhere across the globe. Over the years, our partnership with leading companies encouraged us to innovate and provide better solutions. Since the replacement of traditional methods of online advertising by programmatic advertising, the industry has granted more growth opportunities to ad tech companies around the world. This also helped us to transform our company Vertoz from an ad network to a programmatic advertising company.
Given how technology and consumer behaviour is evolving, it’s difficult to predict the future of the online advertising industry. But change is inevitable, and as it happens, everything related to it has to evolve and grow. Keeping this in mind, I have always inspired my team to try out new things even if they lead to failure. At the end of the day, that is what makes us strong.
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ashish.shah@vertoz.com
