Vator Box on mobile marketing and optimizing ad spend (Rubicon Project, Mozes)

"I like the pitch, Frank's a good pitch man," said Mike Marquez, head of M&A/investments for CBS Interactive. Mike joined us again as our guest host. This week, we look at Frank Addante's ad network optimization company called, Rubicon Project, which you can see on its Vator company profile that it's raised $21 million dollars in financing. We also take a look at Mozes, a mobile marketing platform. As Frank says in his pitch, Rubicon helps publishers make "mad cash." We - Mike, yours truly, Ezra Roizen (VB regular) - all agreed that there's a big business here. Importantly, Mike thinks Rubicon is a great entryway for media companies to have their own advertising network. Not a bad endorsement from a guy who's looking to invest in assets for CBS Interactive. While there are a lot of advertising networks out there, the more comparable networks include Clickable and Yahoo's Real Media. We use Rubicon at Vator.tv. Their sell to us was they'd give us a 10% lift on our CPMs. I'll let you know if that's true as we just turned them on recently. Bottom line - we all think Rubicon is a strong idea and company. And, hey, Frank's pitch was pretty darn good.

We then set our eyes on Mozes, whose closest comp is SayNow. Dorrian Porter gave a good, pithy pitch. Ezra believes that Mozes is great for "venue-based" and "time-based" campaigns, such as a concert. But he also thinks that Mozes can expand its customer base to little-league Dads (like Ezra), whereby someone can text "little league" and get status reports on their phone. Mike agreed that targeting bands and musicians is too small of a market for his interest, but he also knows that Mozes isn't just focused on musicians. Indeed, in my upcoming interview with Dorrian, he does talk about how he's taking Mozes to other potential customers seeking to build a fan base. 

Note: As always, I'm not going to give away our entire discussion. You'll have to take a look. If you'd like to be on Vator Box, or if you'd like to recommend a company we look at, please mention in the comment section. Also, we welcome your comments on our analysis. After all, we're just here to start the dialogue.