Partnership pipeline rebuild
Overview
TrendMD ran a content recommendation widget on academic and scientific publisher websites: text ads, proprietary targeting, 200+ publishers. For one client, the partner network didn't have enough of the right visitors to liquidate the inventory they had available.
After some research, some back-and-forth, and a little refactoring, the fix was to offer our detection and targeting system.
The problem
TrendMD's widget sits on a publisher's site and shows targeted content recommendations. For one client, the volume and type of traffic in the network was not enough to reliably liquidate the ad inventory each month.
The approach
Research showed me that the client had a partner network of their own, but lacked TrendMD's advanced targeting. I identified this as an opportunity and aligned with C-level staff and Engineering to deliver it. Commercial terms were with client C-level counterparts.
We packaged TrendMD's targeting system separately, refactoring it so it could be used independently, then allowed the client deploy it across their own larger network. Targetable users were still a smaller proportion of total traffic, but across a bigger network the numbers worked.
Everyone liked that.
The outcome
The additional inventory liquidation made the economics viable for both sides.
Revenue increased by $200K per month. The client got targeting capability they couldn't have built themselves. TrendMD got a new product to sell. Everyone liked that.
What I'd do differently
The performance feedback loop was informal. Revenue went up, both sides were happy, and that was the measure. I'd build explicit performance metrics into the agreement from the start, because informal success is hard to defend when things change, and hard to repeat.