Page 72 - Adnews Magazine November-December 2021

Feature
“We were at the right place, right time, and prepared for it.” Brad Moran
“We’d obviously been talking to brands and retailers for many, many years, and we thought there was an opportunity there to create the Google AdWords equivalent of retail advertising. We modeled our business on a company called Stripe, which is a payment provider.
“What we learned from our first business was that it’s very hard to scale a business that requires a lot of people.
“We wanted to build a tech platform that was all API driven, that allowed retailers from all over the world to connect to it and provide an open interface for brands to log in and use the plat- form on a self-serve basis ... very much like AdWords and Facebook and LinkedIn.
“It was those two things that allowed us to grow global very quickly and then over the past cou- ple of years retail and media started to become a really big thing.
“E-commerce growth was accelerating rapidly. Amazon was paving the way, so we have Amazon to thank for a lot of the education for the market training.
“It’s just a very natural progression for people like Coke and Pepsi moving from spending money on print, in store and TV to more targeted channels like e-commerce.
“When COVID hit, retailers were in panic mode trying to keep the lights on, to keep an online website running because they weren’t used to the volumes of orders that they were receiving.
“No-one had time to think about new solutions. There was a period for about six months there during the start of COVID where we didn’t talk to any new retailers because they were too busy.
“Then coming out of the back half of the year, there was a big explosion in the industry ... they knew that this was the future. COVID had just accelerated the e-commerce pathway and they knew they had to start monetising this effectively.
“We were at the right place, right time, and prepared for it.”
Moran has had a lot of inquiries in the last three months. “It’s a very rapidly growing space and will only continue to grow.”
CitrusAd is essentially providing the shovels in the gold rush rather than digging for reward.
“I’ve never been referred to as a shovel before, but I’m happy to take it,” he says.
“That was our plan right from the get-go was to provide the tools. And we found that’s what most tier one retailers wanted. They didn’t want someone stepping in between them and their brands. For a lot of the retailers around the world, CitrusAd is ... a technology platform.