Advertising do-it-yourself

Pune firm tells companies how to save on ad budgets

At one level, we live in the do-it-yourself age. While many things are packaged and ready to use out-of-the-box, there are plenty of things, like electronic kits for video games and alarm bells, which come in component form so that hobbyist enthusiasts can get the thrill of assembling the kits themselves.

In the world of business, this is done primarily to give people more control and to save money. And Zimblee, an online self service platform which allows advertisers to directly target publishers, falls in this category.

How it works

Zimblee has tied up with over 35 publishers sites like Shaadi, NDTVMovies, ChennaiLive and a host of others and is allowing companies to advertise directly on these sites without having to go through an ad agency, thereby saving these companies something like 15 to 20 per cent of the costs involved with advertising.

The next important question is cost. "We are offering these services free for advertisers," says Vishal Sharma, founder and CEO of Yureekah, which has created Zimblee. "We make money by having a tie-up with the publishers."

Connecting people

Sharma says that this idea came about when his company was working on Yureekah, a search engine tool for advertising that allows companies to find out how their competitors are advertising. If Honda wants to find out where Toyota is advertising in India, it can use this site to find out.

The next logical thing for a company like Honda to do, of course, would be to advertise in places where Toyota is advertising and Zimblee allows you to do just this, points out Sharma.

Long tail

Many of the organisations whom Yureekah has tied up with are big companies, whose ad charges may be beyond the reach of smaller firms who need to do targeted marketing. Sharma says that his company is planning to address this by looking at smaller publishers. "We don't want to only target premium publishers. We also want to help you to advertise on a blog," he says.

Once this happens, it might be interesting after all, today, a company like Toyota doesn't need any help in approaching and advertising on a Financial Express site. However, a small company with limited budgets could really benefit if it hears about a respected blogger who is able to enable it to reach its target audience.

How does it work?
Many companies love talking about what their site offers, but not how it is done and Yureekah is also adopting this line. Sharma says that his site uses a patent pending technology and that he is not keen on revealing how it works.

QUICK TAKE
>>Zimblee is a new service from Yureekah
>>It allows advertisers to directly approach online publishers
>>An interesting thing is that it is going to address smaller publishers too