How Products Can Evolve from Services

Posted by: Steve Hamm on May 20

Jay Kulkarni left his management job at DoubleClick in the midst of the US recession in 2002 to start a company that would provide services for the online advertising industry. Seven years later, his company, Theorem Inc., has 425 employees in India and 20 in the United States and is probably the largest interactive media outsourcing specialist in the world. Revenues have grown at more than 70 percent year over year. But a funny thing happened on the road to outsourcing success: Kulkarni and his engineers stumbled upon a nifty product to sell. CreativesOnTap.com, which will go live this summer, makes it cheap and easy for small businesses with limited budgets to create their own online display ads. Think of it as Visual Basic for banner ads. “Search is sexy. I love it. But there’s only so much a text search ad can do,” says Kulkarni. Display advertising is underutilized. You need display to tell a story. It will come back.”

The publishing industry sure hopes so….

And, clearly, CreativesOnTap.com could help. With a few clicks of a mouse, small business folk can get into game and build a banner ad from a combination of their own logo and photos, plus content and images supplied by Theorem. The costs is expected to be from $5 to $25 per ad, depending on complexity. Theorem also hopes to make money by licensing the technology to large Web sites, so they can offer the banner ad workshop right on their site—built in.

The new technology won’t be able to turn the tide of banner advertising single-handedly, but it takes some of the friction out of commerce, and that can’t do anything but help.

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