Announcer:

Are you ready for an open discussion with the best of the best and the best of what's next? Welcome to the Tony DUrso Show. Join in on a great conversation today with some of the world's great influencers as they showcase great advice and techniques that made them the game changers they are today. Now here's Tony DUrso.

Tony:

Welcome. I'm your host, Tony DUrso. I interview some of the most successful people in the world, and I thank you for joining us. This show is dedicated to helping you turn your vision into reality, and we are the number one show on voiceamerica.com. We're going to talk with Vlad Edelman in just a moment. He created a game changing tool for restaurants, and I'm thinking you entrepreneurs out there can zone into this and probably do something for your industry as well, or at least learn more of what it takes to promote and advertise what you provide. And before we get into this, I want to thank our sponsor of today's show that made it all possible. Fundrise: Start building your better portfolio today. Get started at www.fundrise.com/durso to have your first 90 days of advisory fees waived. More details just ahead on this sponsor with a lot more info about them, so please stay tuned. As you know, my interviews with the world's elite entrepreneurs are all about helping you launch your new business or take your business to the next level, and we also cover a lot of great information for everyone else. Sometimes the penny drops with the right information for you to start something profitable yourself or help you do your job a whole lot better. I love to help you and I love to hear how these world-class interviews are helping you. Please give me a hand and subscribe. Rate and review my show on Apple podcasts right now. If you need help, you can go to www.ratethispodcast.com/tony. That will walk you through the review process. And here's a shout out to Paul Angles who said "There are countless business podcasts out there. A few are interesting, few have good information, and only a couple occupy that narrow intersection of informative and interesting. Tony's guests are phenomenal and he’s just getting better at getting more out of them than just about anyone. A definite must listen." I am so grateful to hear that, Paul. I try really hard to do good interviews and your kind review really sums up my focus in getting the most vital information out to my audience. Thank you so much, and you have my eternal gratitude. Guys. If you want to help me help more people and help get my show to those that need to hear this in the world, please consider giving me a review. The easy way is to go to Apple podcasts or go to www.ratethispodcast.com/tony. A kind five-star review helps grow and support the show and you get my eternal thanks. That's priceless. All right, let's get into it. Today's show is about the world's first virtual ad agency with Vlad Edelman. Let's see what we can learn today. At the end of this interview, I'll give you a summary recap of what we went over, so stay tuned for that. Vlad Edelman has been in the restaurant industry for over ten years and has helped the likes of Ansible, Soapbox Mobile and ESPN’s mobile business increase their CX. In 2014, he founded the game-changing product, HEROFI, that focused exclusively on creating better customer engagement tools for restaurants. Here we go. Hi, Vlad. Welcome to the Tony DUrso Show. So glad to have you on with us today.

Vlad:

Great to be here, Tony. Thanks for having me

Tony:

Vlad, I'm very interested in talking about the world's first virtual ad agency. I've been doing social media marketing and marketing for decades. I've written a couple books on marketing, and this is a subject that fascinates me as well as my very large entrepreneur and small business owner audience. So we do have the corporate executives in there and the corporate world too. Very interesting topic. I want to learn all about it, but before we do that Vlad, let's follow your journey to success. How did it all start for you? What's your backstory?

Vlad:

So oddly enough, I started kind of on the other side of the fence as you might call it if you spend any time in the journalism arena. But I started actually as a journalist writing about technology during the web 1.0 evolution in the late '90s and early 2000s. I got a degree in journalism and was a stringer for the Globe and Boston Magazine, Psychology Today, Playboy. I was writing articles really about this new coming evolution called the web and the internet, and eventually journalism was just too high paying, and so I decided to transition to the business side of the media industry and wound up joining a couple of interesting things. I helped launch and run CBS.com, which was one of the first large media network sites. I did some similar work for NewsCorp with Fox, but the biggest piece on the media side was really helping to build ESPN's mobility business from zero. I was their first mobile employee and their youngest Vice President. Wound up building that to a quarter billion dollars in revenue in the time of ringtones and wallpapers and all things mobile, when money was made hand over fist internationally on things that today just seem silly in terms of being for sale. At that point, were really interesting, good businesses. That eventually evolved. We launched a phone six months before the iPhone. By the way, that's another great side story as Steve Jobs was on our board. At ESPN, I felt like I had kind of accomplished a number of things on the media side and kept hearing the words 'let's get somebody to pay for this and we'll do this' every time I wanted to do something cool. And so I decided to transition to the marketing side of the house, sort of the dark side and go to where the money is, and really start to see if I could continue to work in the area where consumers and experiences intersect, which is what was fascinating me then and still fascinates me today, and I'll kind of explain how. So, after ESPN, I moved more into the agency world. I was recruited as the CEO of a small text messaging platform company called Soapbox Mobile out here in California, and that was the first stint that I had in California for a year, building this text messaging company into essentially an agency, because at that point, and still today to the most part, advertisers and creatives and marketers don't really know automatically what to do with the technology just because it exists, and so context is important in creating use cases and contextual relevance is critical. And so, I took what essentially was a defunct text messaging platform and built a $5 million top line agency around it within a year with some great customers, including the Marines and House of Blues and Ford, and then wound up selling that to Interpublic group to start Ansible, which is still one of the world's largest mobile marketing agencies. I became its founding CEO; built that from zero to more than 20 million in billings in less than two years, wound up moving on to WPP, which is the other large marketing conglomerate and helping globalize an agency called Icon, which was also a very mobile-centric agency. At the end of that tenure, what I realized is I didn't love the advertising world. What I loved was building companies, and so I realized that where I really wanted to be and the experience that I really loved, which was Soapbox Mobile and building something really from scratch and selling it eventually. I was recruited by a person who is now the chairman of my board here at Targetable, and has become a close friend since we met. He is a Midas list venture capitalist from Sony, who was at that point with Matrix Partners, a big VC out on the East Coast. He recruited me as part of a turnaround team for a company called EnvIO Networks, which was a behavioral consumer analytics company. I wouldn't say it was floundering when we got there. It was a team of us that got there, but they were very mired in the technology and not focused enough on the use case for their technology. Long story short there, we wound up essentially building one of the first mobile ad networks very early in the industry. It was called Sky Weaver and we built and launched it before Ad Mob and a lot of other networks were even around. Wound up selling the IP of that company to Google and eventually moving out here to San Diego - for good this time - about 10 years ago to become the Chief Product Officer for a company called Buzztime. Buzztime is really where the story of Targetable begins because I joined Buzztime as its Chief Product Officer after the company has been public already for 20 years and it had pioneered a very entertaining and novel service. I'm sure you or many of your listeners have seen Buzztime's product, even if they didn't realize it was Buzztime, but it's these poker games and trivia contests and all these little games and things that connect people in bars and restaurants, and they provided those feeds by television channels, essentially inside those bars and restaurants. They would give out these Playmaker devices, these big blue kinds of clunky play school things. And in the '80s and '90s, this idea of connecting individual people in very diverse and disparate locations for the purposes of playing games together and competing was extremely novel, and it required some pretty amazing technology back office work to make it all hang together and work in a really synchronized way. The problem when I got there and for a number of years even beforehand, is that everybody after 2000 pretty much had a common activity in their pocket. It was their mobile phone. A lot of these locations, these bars and restaurants had started to provide WIFI access as kind of part of their standard service. And so, what was very unique and very innovative for years became a lot less unique and a lot less special and still fairly pricing, because the company charged a substantial amount of money for the service. And so, when I arrived there, the question was okay, we have three and a half thousand bars and restaurants as our customers. We have a not very compelling, pretty expensive service. What do we do to become relevant again? And eventually what we wound up doing after thinking about this quite a while and analyzing the market is, I wound up building the first tableside ordering tablets for the restaurant industry, essentially before Yelo.Red and Presto Tab, and a lot of other folks who are now in the industry. I specced it from ground up and launched 64,000 of them into the field with one of our largest customers, Buffalo Wild Wings, at Buzztime.

Tony:

This is the Tony DUrso Show where you could learn from the wisdom and success of others to help you move on your vision path. Just ahead the chat continues about the world's first virtual ad agency with Vlad Edelman, but first it's time for us to take a short break. See you back here in just a moment.

Tony:

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Announcer:

You're listening to the Tony DUrso Show with special VIP guests. Now back to Tony and his guest.

Tony:

All right. We're back on the Tony DUrso Show where you can learn from the wisdom and success of others to help you move on your vision path. Let's see what we can learn today. Today's show is about the world's first virtual ad agency with Vlad Edelman. At the end of this interview, I'll give you a summary of what I got out of this, and I'll share some pointers with you. Stay tuned for that. Over the last five years, Vlad has built a company that focuses on equaling out the advertisement playing field. Through using modern rules-engines, real-time data visualization and automated content targeting, Vlad’s company, Targetable, delivers an incredibly powerful, affordable, and platform-agnostic advertising engine that allows all retail companies to play like consumer giants. All right. And now back to the chat with Vlad.

Vlad:

And in rolling out that product, I got to know the retail and restaurant sector really, really well. I wound up spending hours and hours with the restauranteurs, whether they were operators, owners, franchisees, franchise owners. You know, I watched a computer sitting in puddles of water and beer. I watched technology falling apart because of operational challenges. I watched the challenges that these types of businesses had because of their physicality as I call it, which is operating in the physical world brings with it tremendous amounts of challenges that virtualized businesses don't have. And what I realized is that while the tablet that I built was solving a problem, there was a much bigger problem to solve and there was a much easier way of solving it than dragging all of Buzztime's 20 years of technological debt and business operating debt on my back to do it. And so, five years ago, I spun out of Buzztime and started Targetable. Targetable's mission was really laser focused, which is solve problems of the physical world for retailers in order to help them compete with digital retail.

Tony:

Vlad, this is really interesting. There's so much to comment on. There is so much to talk about. There's so much I want to dive in and now we're getting into Targetable, which is what you're doing now. We're talking about the world's first virtual ad agency that you are the founder of. And I want to make sure that it's very clear, you're talking about the mission, which is great. When you started, I want to understand what was that vision that you had for Targetable. You may have said it, but I just want to make sure we get that because I have another question pending on that.

Vlad:

The mission of targetable was very simple, which was help physical retail compete with virtual retail, and that's very, very vague. And the reason that it was vague is because what we wanted to do was grow organically, not take any investor dollars and really work with our customers for a couple of years before we committed to building a massive platform, which is what Targetable is today and what launched in October of 2019. That product has been 40 years in the making. The reason for that is because we started essentially as an agency. Before we virtualized an agency, we decided to operate as an agency and to work with large retailers to develop technology products that help them market in real time and as close to real time as possible, because we identified this need for physical retail to be able to react to data, to situations, to everything from inventory levels, to weather, to traffic, to sports scores, things going on in the real world. They had no way of reacting to it. And when Amazon changes their prices, 15 and a half thousand times per day, you are lucky if a physical retailer changes their prices once a week. And so this information, this data that they used to drive the decisions of physical retail, the industry functions in annual quarters. It functions in months and weeks, and what we realized after four years of working with Buffalo Wild Wings, with Westfield Malls, with MGM Resorts, with Skechers Shoes, what we realized is the problem that we could solve is that we could virtualize all of the operations of a media buying and planning agency and we could allow those customers, our clients to create advertising that reacted to data instantaneously. And that's what Targetable the platform is.

Tony:

Fantastic! We're talking with the founder of the world's first virtual ad agency, Vlad Edelman, and you can find out more about him at www.targetable.com. Vlad, this is very great. And I think we just caught your purpose of what... I just want to make sure we understand that succinctly. The purpose. Why do you get up every day? Why are you doing what you're doing with Targetable?

Vlad:

What I love to do is I love to create technology that solves problems. There's nothing like watching a customer or a client use our product and be successful. That is absolute. That's a drug. There are people who are addicted to real drugs; I'm addicted to the feeling of watching people use products that I create. Whether that was a phone at ESPN or websites for the Simpsons or really successful campaigns or mobile applications, what I've always focused on and what's always gotten me excited is the intersection of technology driving consumer behavior, driving consumers to engage with content, engage with a product and do something, and so Targetable is really the culmination of that because as a platform, it does everything. It's such a cool product, and I apologize for being my own fan boy, but what we've created is unique in the market because it's almost like a magical machine. It creates instantaneously ads that are pre-formatted for Facebook, for Instagram. Google is coming for business and AdWords and maps. Other platforms are coming - Yelp and Next Door and Open Table and TripAdvisor. And so instantaneously by using data that we pull in about the customer, about the environment that they're working in and their physical locations are operating in, our system instantaneously produces ads that are not only pre-formatted for the networks that they're to be published on, but they are also pre-targeted, which is why it's Targetable. Meaning that they're not just dumb ads that are a picture of a cheeseburger saying buy our cheeseburger from the cheeseburger company. Every single ad that the system creates comes with strategy associated with it. And when we worked for four years to really learn the market and understand from our customers what was the problem we were trying to solve; it was the lack of strategy that we realized was the real problem. Most of our customers can figure out a way to put together a digital ad. They can work with an agency or they have a cousin who's good with computers. There's a huge range, but what they didn't know is what to do with that ad.

Tony:

Vlad, there's many ways to automate our marketing. There is software, all sorts of tips and tricks out there. There are people that are trying it. I don't believe that everyone's very successful at it. What are some of the mistakes that people make when they try to automate it and do it themselves?

Vlad:

Well, I think the first mistake is I think that they don't realize the importance of frequency, because good advertising before we even get into machine learning and AI and advanced data helping inform what ads you show to what person at what time, you have to have enough advertising out there in the first place to have an impact. And the number one problem that we've seen with a lot of our customers is they simply don't put out enough advertising at enough different times of the day, and they don't buy enough of it. They spend so much time overthinking one ad that they forget about the strategy itself, which is how much am I buying? What eyeballs am I targeting? How often is this ad going to be shown? What is the frequency? At what time during the day? And if they get through the point of creating one ad and they get to the point of creating the strategy for that one ad, well then to be successful, you have to do that then a hundred more times over and over and over and over again, because advertising like a lot of things is hit and miss. You have to fail enough times to understand what's going to be successful. And so, to answer your question, the number one problem that everybody that we've run into that struggles with digital advertising and social advertising has, is simply frequency. They just don't do it enough.

Tony:

Thank you. Very interesting on that. So, if they use Targetable, it's automatic and I've been through some of the demos and I've been through some of the process of how it works. It's absolutely brilliant. Can you take us in a little bit maybe - because this is audio only and so people can't actually see slide by slide - in a way kind of describe what happens with the Targetable system?

Vlad:

What happens is really simple. You log on to the platform and the way you logged on to Targetable, and if you just go to www.targetable.com, it's kind of self-explanatory from there, but the one thing that we need you to do as a customer is to use Facebook login. And Facebook login, which is really common at this point - I'm pretty sure that all of your listeners have had to use Facebook to log in to some service at some point, especially lately. That gives us enough information for the system to go out and as we are welcoming you to the platform, the system is going out and it's assembling what call the rich data profile and the rich data profile consists of essentially three different types of data. It's data about your business, which we get from Facebook because you allowed us to by using Facebook authentication. And that means what is your business name? What is your business location? What are things about your business that are relevant and will help us target advertising? That is also everything that has ever been put or reviewed or put on the internet anywhere about your business, which means our system goes out and using natural language recognition assembles every review, every comment, every like and dislike on every platform about your business into this profile. It doesn't stop there though. It goes out after that and starts to assemble the data that's important because you operate in the physical world. And so, we have integrations with weather feeds. We have integration with traffic feeds. We have integration with demographics and segmentation, and so we start to assemble into this data profile information about the physical world that surrounds you and is important to the advertising that the system will then start to create.

Tony:

This is the Tony DUrso Show where you could learn from the wisdom and success of others to help you move on your vision path. Just ahead the chat continues about the world's first virtual ad agency with Vlad Edelman, but first it's time for us to take a short break. See you back here in just a moment. Hey guys. You want to curl up with a good book? Here's a good book recommendation for you. I'm announcing a book that I've worked on for years with SKR and the title is Imen of Atlantis. The Pursuit is the first book, volume one. It's a trilogy; we've spent years on this. It's been a labor of love. The first book is now available at www.tonydurso.com/imen, and the second book is following in another week or so. It's a fiction story of what happened in Atlantis once upon a time, and there are multiple storylines that merge and converge together. Some of the key players are Bomo, Roni, Eyvind, Raidon, Korin, and it involves the main kingdoms of Carron, Carthinia and a plot against Bodon. You would think this has to do with contemporary times, but it was never written for that purpose. This first book is about the love of money - especially gold - and what people and rulers will do to get as much as they can. What is the Imen? Who are they? Well, once a powerful race, the Imen captured and dominated every nation and territory on the four land masses of Atlantis until none were left. War was a form of sport and no one presented a challenge great enough for them. It wasn't until they had reached the final conquest when a divine intervention personified as a messenger was sent by the Creator to offer an ultimatum. The Imen were given a choice to set down their weapons forever in exchange for the gifts of healing and regain their spiritual powers. Most accepted this ultimatum, and those who refused perished as predicted. The abilities of the Imen? Well, you'll have to read the books and see what they can do. They can do some things that are beyond amazing and beyond our reality. Go to www.tonydurso.com/imen and get The Pursuit. I think it's going to leave you breathless. Thanks, and happy reading.

Announcer:

You're listening to the Tony DUrso Show with special VIP guests. Now back to Tony and his guest.

Tony:

All right. We're back on the Tony DUrso Show where you can learn from the wisdom and success of others to help you move on your vision path. Let's see what we can learn today. Today's show is about the world's first virtual ad agency with Vlad Edelman. At the end of this interview, I'll give you a summary of what I got out of this, and I'll share some pointers with you. Stay tuned for that. Join me on Twitter @TonyDurso and get in on the fun. You can message me there too. That's @TonyDurso on Twitter. And now back to the chat with Vlad.

Vlad:

And so minutes after engaging with Targetable, you are presented with a smart feed, which is very similar to what you would see on Instagram or any other very classic in today's mobile world, Snapchat, et cetera. This very simple feed-like engagement mechanics, but you will have a feed available to you of ads that have been automatically created by the system, and that have been automatically targeted for you. And so within minutes, you are looking at the product of what an agency would take anywhere from two to six weeks of meetings and phone calls and information exchanges with you, and what would take tens of thousands of dollars of work and data licensing and targeting to produce. You are looking at fully packaged-up campaigns that are ready to be published on Facebook in multiple Facebook format, on Instagram in multiple Instagram formats, and that if you wanted to, you could push the publish button, which we call the EASY button inside of our system and it immediately goes and publishes on Facebook. So within minutes you have pre targeted, pre-formatted ads out and running for your business, helping drive people, helping drive check sizes, helping drive revenue, really mapped to the core performance indicators that are critical to physical businesses. It's rare that a customer will just publish the ads that a system instantaneously, which is why we have a ton of editing tools available so every ad that the system creates you can dig in and you can change the editorial, you can change the copy, you can change the strategy, how much you want to spend, how long it's going to run. You can tweak all of those things in the system, but our job is to give you a really good baseline. Even if you don't use those ads right out of the gate, what the system does is it creates those baseline ads, knowing that it already is starting you at a very high level of giving you ads that we know will work, and we know will work well enough to get you going and will start getting data back to the system. That's the third piece of data that's super important, which is how are these ads performing, because the system doesn't just create and publish the ads for you, it also monitors and optimizes those ads using machine learning throughout the life of them.

Tony:

Vlad, what about just social media marketing, posting, talking about the products. I get the ad part and that's very critical, very important. Various businesses and restaurants have different size ad budgets. They can only spend so much. Regardless of the return, they have their budgets, but can your system also be used to just get more promotion going, get more people to just know about what you have and some of the cool things without it being an actual ad campaign?

Vlad:

Our system is really architected around paid advertising and promoted ads. You can create your own social ads in it. You can create your own posts, etcetera. What we've learned is that unpaid media doesn't work. Posting pictures to your own Instagram feed, if you are a restaurant, you know who that reaches? That reaches you, your family, your friends, and a couple of dozen Indonesian bots. That's it! There are not enough people who subscribe to the restaurant pages of a Carl's Jr. or a Jamba juice. There simply isn't enough audience for that to make a substantial enough impact to a business of that size, and so what we promote very aggressively is ... organic posting in organic social media is all well and good if you want to grow organically, but if you want to really have an impact, a material impact on the business, then you have to buy advertising. Now here's the amazing part, Tony, is you don't need to buy a lot of it. I mean, we've shown results from as little as $5 a day, the cost of a Starbucks latte, but the key is to buy it consistently and to make sure that every penny of what you're buying is buying the most relevant advertising for the most relevant eyeballs possible. And that's a geographic question. That's a segmentation question. That's a creative question. That's what the system is really architected to solve. It's there to make sure that every dollar you spend is spent in the most optimal way.

Tony:

That makes great sense, Vlad. Right now, Targetable really works on restaurants. Are you going to take this to other retail business - clothing, shoes, supplements, all sorts of items? What's the future hold for that?

Vlad:

Absolutely. The restaurant focus of Targetable is really self-created for two reasons. One is, it's a segment we really know. We spent over a decade in the restaurant technology business and we have the use cases. We've driven tens of millions of dollars in incremental revenue into POS systems of our customers doing the kinds of things that we've now packaged up and automated inside Targetable. So when we thought about, hey, we're going to build a platform that automates the buying and planning digital social media, we decided let's start with an area that we know really well, because we know how to do this really well for restaurants. And so, yes, initially the goal is to really focus on restaurants, both domestically and eventually internationally, but we already have customers signing up online that are pulling themselves through our sales funnel who are not restaurants, who are fashion boutiques, who are grocery stores, who are bagel stores so the need for this is so acute. There is so much need for just a really good basic solution to buying digital social media that the media that works the best of objectively speaking at driving people through local doors is local social media. There is nothing else that will work as effectively as that type of ad buy, and before Targetable, there really wasn't any tool to do that. Yeah, this is a tool that's built for retail, so we're starting with restaurants, but we'll be moving on to any business that operates in the physical world for the foreseeable future, and eventually even we can conceive of working with pure digital businesses as well. It's just that we really specialize and understand how to use that data that impacts physical world decisions really well and so we're going to stick to that for at least a couple of years.

Tony:

I see that as the future here, where more and more types of businesses, as we just talked about are going to engage in some sort of marketing automation, and you've got such a great platform for it. It makes perfect sense that you're just going to grow and grow and grow to coffee shops, bagel shops, clothing, all sorts of things. It's there. It's ready for you. And I think that it's something that if you can just show how workable this is to other parts, I think there'll be a lot of demand for what you have, maybe even spin off the company and create some other companies similar to it.

Vlad:

Yeah. From your lips... So the way that we look at it, there are two things you said that I just want to really agree with loudly. What we learned quickly before building Targetable is two things. One is, the tool has to be built in a way that is simple enough for people to engage with, so we didn't build a tool that looks like Facebook's ad platform manager, or Google's ad word manager. They've been working on those platforms, Tony for over a decade and they're still a mess. They still look like Excel spreadsheet monster from hell that meets Tableau, nor do we look like Marketo® or Eloqua® or BlueKai® or any of the other big marketing automation tools that are really built for agency media planners and people who understand the lingo and the inner workings of the media world. Our tool is built for you and I. It's built for normal people. It's built for anybody who can use Instagram or Uber or Shopify. That's the track that we took early on and said, we're going to build a tool that is going to be dead simple enough. The work it does is extremely complex and similar to Shopify or Uber. When you look at an Uber screen and you see that little dot of your car getting closer to where you are to pick you up, it looks really, really simple, but you realize that what's going on in the background, the fact that they've completely virtualized dispatch in a global world is tremendously complex in order to pull off that simplicity. Well, we're not any different. What we're doing in the background, assembling terabytes worth of data about a customer in seconds and generating ads and targeting them, all for you to be able to open up a smart feed and see really simple things. There's an ad. It's been targeted for you and a big button that says publish and the results that we're seeing from our customers of how well the system is working, I have to tell you, Tony, they are completely bananas. We're pushing 10, 11, 12% top line revenue gains for some of our customers, simply because the system is putting out enough advertising that's well enough targeted to make a difference. And so, the baseline with the physical world is very different from the virtualized world. And these kinds of quick easy gains from simply doing things the right way, it's not mad science. It's something that is actually quite doable and I think that's where a lot of our customers are truly surprised early on at how quickly the system can generate those results.

Tony:

This is the Tony DUrso Show where you could learn from the wisdom and success of others to help you move on your vision path. Just ahead the chat continues about the world's first virtual ad agency with Vlad Edelman, but first it's time for us to take a short break. See you back here in just a moment.

Tony:

As you just heard in the prior commercial, some of you authors out there, you know what it's like to take a long time to write a book and put it out and how happy and proud you are to produce such a work of art. And you really want other people to experience that joy and that knowledge or that story that you provide. Well, that's how it is with myself and my coauthor SKR about our new book, Imen of Atlantis, volume one: The Pursuit, and you'll see it at www.tonydurso.com/imen. I'm going to read a short little section of it. "They were thought to dwell in the forest, but their world remained secretly hidden from everyone. Unbeknownst to the hunters, an ancient civilization existed beneath the forest floor. This was the magical world of Imen-Hera, a subterranean land bustling with life. It was home to the Imen who were magical beings. Still, they were not truly magicians, per se. Instead, they possessed great spiritual powers. The Imen were also known to possess the gift of healing and magical potions and were rarely seen by anyone. They were summoned from Imen-Hera by signals sent below to their world by unique trees. The trees communicated by signals when any injured being - man, animal or bird - was sensed in the forest. It was the duty of the Imen to aid those in need of help. They were bound to this duty as penance for their once evil ways in the past, having long abandoned them in exchange for a chance to redeem themselves and eventually rejoin the creator." What happens next is what happens when the extreme love of gold begins to enter the picture. I hope you check it out. It's a good book. Volume one is The Pursuit; volume two coming shortly after that is called Dark Horizons. You'll find it at www.tonydurso.com/imen. Happy reading.

Announcer:

You're listening to the Tony DUrso Show with special VIP guests. Now back to Tony and his guest.

Tony:

All right. We're back on the Tony DUrso Show where you can learn from the wisdom and success of others to help you move on your vision path. Let's see what we can learn today. Today's show is about the world's first virtual ad agency with Vlad Edelman. At the end of this interview, I'll give you a summary of what I got out of this, and I'll share some pointers with you. Stay tuned for that. Join me on Twitter @TonyDurso and get in on the fun. You can message me there too. That's @TonyDurso on Twitter. And now back to the chat with Vlad. Vlad, are there any personal habits that contribute to your vision success that you say, this has really helped me become successful. Tell us what kind of habits you may have for that.

Vlad:

Make a lot of mistakes and own them. You know, one of the things that I say this a lot to our investors. At this point while we operated profitably and as a bootstrap for the first four years of our existence, today we've taken over seven and a half million in seed, and we just launched a big series A, so we do have quite a few investors, many of them just truly tremendous people with enormous experience and expertise. And if you're closed, if your approach to learning is, I know what I'm doing. Just give me the check and shut up and let me make you money, that might work for you if you're Elon Musk and you've got the track record. Maybe not as much as he'd like, but certainly that approach is present in the venture world. My approach is really different, which is I've made tons of mistakes. This is my fourth startup, and the mistakes of my past have helped inform the success of today's company, Targetable, and it's going to help inform my future. But if you don't realize what your mistakes are and if you don't work to fix them, and if you're not humble in front of the gargantuan undertaking that starting a company really is, and you're not humble in front of what it takes for somebody to write you a check with very little ultimately to go on, except the strength of your word that you're going to be successful. If you're not humble with that money, and you're not humble with your own openness to learning and to understanding your mistakes, you're going to fail - 9 times out of 10. And the problem is, you're not going to know why you fail, and you're going to keep making that mistake over and over again. So, my motto is very simple, make new mistakes. My goal is always to make new mistakes because mistakes are inevitable, but repeating mistakes is stupid.

Tony:

I never heard of it said that way before. Very good on that. Vlad, we have as mentioned a large entrepreneur and small business owner audience. We're always looking to gain wisdom and understanding and learn from the success of others. We want to learn from you. We want every interview, every guest, you always have something great to share that helps us move up another level. Are there any great resources that you would love to share with our audience success squad?

Tony:

God, that's a hard question to answer because there's so many things that I could say, but I think the best thing I can tell you is find a mentor. Find somebody you trust and find somebody you respect that you can truly be open with who's your business psychiatrist and don't lie to them. Tell them your fears, tell them your worries and your problems and find somebody whose opinion you trust, who's not necessarily involved into the day to day running of your business, and nurture that relationship so that the information you get back from them, the advice and the analysis is a reflection of the truth and not a reflection of what you want to hear. I've had people in my life at very key junctions that not only helped me kind of grow to the next level as an executive, but were brutally honest with me in terms of the mistakes that I was making or the things that I wasn't seeing because of my own ego or because of my own lack of empathy or humbleness. Finding those people is hard, but it's worth the search because they will provide the information and they will provide the relationships that will make you very successful. And so there's lots of other things, Tony. I can make a huge list of the Google product development process that we used to create Targetable that was absolutely ingenious and that we still use, and Amazon resources that we use today that have been amazing. But if I think about a single thing, it's find a mentor and treat them well.

Tony:

That's very well said. Very well said and Very great advice. Once again, we are talking with the founder of the world's first virtual ad agency Vlad Edelman, and you can find him at www.targetable.com. That's www.targetable.com. Vlad, you've given us so much information. I see the whole world changing. Just when we thought we knew marketing and automation, this comes about. It's a game changer, I think. We're going to see that roll out different forms perhaps, or hybrids into every other retail business we can think of eventually.

Vlad:

Absolutely. And I can't thank you enough for the opportunity to talk to your audience. It's things like this that really make a difference, which is we can use all of the advertising dollars that we can pump into our sales funnel, but the things that create truly in organic growth and truly step function growth in our business are all relationships, and it's all getting in front of people like you and people like the entrepreneurs in your audience who can use our product in a way we haven't thought of, who can use it in a way for their business that we haven't necessarily thought of, and then eventually that could become a feature and that can become a future for our product. We've virtualized ad agencies, but I'm excited to see the people that can use us as a stepping stone to virtualize other services and ways to use data to virtualize other businesses, and that's what really exciting.

Tony:

Hey, fellow entrepreneurs. Thanks for hanging out with me while I featured an elite entrepreneur who took his vision to reality. I hope this was as inspiring for you as it was for me to do this interview. I learned some good online advertising practices with some great ideas I'm going to chat about in a second. The insights are so valuable. So how did you like it? The world's first virtual ad agency with Vlad Edelman. Vlad is very astute in recognizing that advertisers and marketers don't really know what to do with technology just because it exists. It's a big world out there and sometimes, everything seems to have its learning curve to understand what it is and how to use it. I find myself in the same boat and I'm glad someone like Vlad is there to help connect the dots for us. He's got the knack for this as we can see from his taking on a defunct text messaging company and building it to a $5 million agency in a year. Selling that, he built one of the world's largest mobile marketing agencies that generated $20 million in billings in less than two years. And Vlad went from company to company, inputting his abilities to grow them further and further. I reiterate some of this to bring home the point that it took time for Vlad to really understand his strengths, what he loves and what he was really good at doing, and that is in building companies. I think a lot of us find ourselves in these shoes that it takes successes and failures to really get to know ourselves better and what we are best suited at, don't you agree? I also see throughout this that Vlad loves to solve problems and that's one of his strengths, which he uses to make something out of the resources a company has, even though world changes and events have reduced the need for that item or service. Do you or your company have resources that do not seem as useful as it once did because of world changes? This is where brilliance and success is made. I know it may be easier said than done, but having some good masterminds or think tanks around the resources may open up something worthwhile. It has worked for Vlad as he bounced and jumped from change to change. But that seems to be how business has to be done in a constantly changing world, don't you agree? His latest company helps physical retail compete with virtual retail. It's not just vague. It also seems like a very difficult challenge in a growing technological world. Many retail establishments are shutting down, one after the other, while the online world takes over. It's quite the daunting task to make retail also known as brick and mortar deal with the online, but there are very ingenious ways to do it such as what Vlad has done. I see the genius of his current company in helping their clients create advertising that reacts to data instantaneously. There's so much more on this interview. Vlad also points out how imperative it is to get a good mentor. This can never be stressed enough. For many, it is the difference between success and failure. It's that blunt! Get a mentor if you don't have one, guys. Please listen to this again. Take notes and soak it all up and see how this interview can either apply to your particular scenario, or if it gives you the stimulus to get some of those ideas out of your head and into the real world. There's so much more I got out of this interview. What did you get? I'd love to know how you use this information to help you in your business or career. Now grab hold of your vision. Decide you're either going to start something great or take it to the next level. You have to decide first. It always starts with the decision and you can get my Vision Map to help you along the process. The eBook is at www.tonydurso.com/books. You can pick up the audio version and the training class too. Highly recommended! I created my empire in just a few years. That's all it took. I had the Vision Map as my guide. You can do it too. Let's help you move on your journey to success. Once again, please consider supporting the show with a nice review. Just go to www.ratethispodcast.com/tony. Thanks guys and remember: just take action. Success awaits those who persevere and remain steadfast despite the odds. Sow good seeds, do good deeds and join me on the next episode of the Tony DUrso Show.

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