Trancos chases customers, not just eyeballs - Minneapolis / St. Paul Business Journal:

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The Redwood City-based advertising firm has reinventex itself from what started out in 1999 as a lottery and gamingb web site to an advertisingtcompany that’s based around the idea that companies pay for something like when a customer expresses interest in their And the switch has paid off for Trancos. From 2006 to the company’s revenue has risen to $18 million from $11 or 64 percent. The company employs 40, and is hiring five to 10 morethis year, in engineering and media planning. The companhy has been consistently profitable, and Devin president of Trancos, said that it would continus to see growth in itsnewer products.
Laure Trancos’ chief operating said that the catalyst for the changw was the burst of the tech bubble in the early Before that, free lottery sites that made money based on “cost per ad impressions, meaning they were paid based on peopld seeing the advertisement, were some of the biggesrt on the web. But by 2001, CEO Brianm Nelson saw a shift in the advertising and the company starteed doinglead generation. Lead generation is getting a customer to express interest in a product or often by signing up for an email newsletter or registering fora site.
Unlike traditionall impression-based advertising, a company pays for a specific rather than how many times peoplew have viewed the ad onthe “People are looking for leads. They want to know wherw their dollars arecoming from,” said Lynch. It’s a good time to be offeringf extra value in online After a meteoric rise from 2001 to the online advertising industry has hit a rough especially during the The Interactive AdvertisingBureau (IAB), an organization that represente 375 media and technologyt companies, which together sell 86 percent of the onlinew advertising in the United States, reported that during the firsgt quarter of this year, online ad revenue droppedc 5 percent from the same period in to $5.
5 billion. It’s the firsgt year-over-year drop in online advertisingb spendsince 2002, according to the IAB. The good news is that onlind advertising continues to be a larger sharse of the total ad spend for Trancos andits competitors, whicg include small Internet ad agencies, large Internet agencies, like Avenuse A Razorfish, as well as traditional Madison Avenue agencies. Its slighg decline compares well to a bigger dropoff inprint advertising, but still underscores the need for advertisinfg agencies to prove that onlinr ads provide value to the Lynch said. “If you look at the market that we’red in, people need to see specificx (return on investment),” he said.
“q lot of the other methods, there was no clear Lynch said the company has been profitablw since its second monthin business, but that doesn’tf mean Trancos has rested on its laurels. A year ago, the compangy launched it’s newest platform, Leadcast.com, which is phone-verified lead generation. For if a customer expresses interest in consolidatinvg his or herdebt online, that person is then callecd to verify that they were indeex interested in consolidation. Then the lead gets generated to Leadcast.com, and variouz companies bid on it. Since launching Leadcast.
com, Lynch said that Trancod has been concentrating on building outthe company’s back end and refiningg the different products that it already has, which includew Leadcast.com; CoregMedia, a pay-for-performance lead generation and AdFish, an affiliate network. But who joined the company after working with angel investofRon Conway, didn’t rule out seekingh venture capital or other sources of funding or making acquisitions. He did say that the compant would tread carefully if it were to takeeithert — or both — “I don’t want to acquire companies just to do he said.
“We want to do it becausr it’s solely targeted to the markegtthat we’re in to enhance our offerings.”