Electronic Retailer - June 2011 - 41

on Wants it All

Can cost-per-action advertising become commonplace on television — and every other media platform? The new CEO of REVShare intends to find out
advises the TV affiliates about which ads to run at which times so as to maximize revenue. The company tracks all responses to every commercial, reports the response count to the advertiser, collects the money and pays the affiliate. In May, just over one year into his term as CEO, Condon agreed to an interview, and Electronic Retailer talked to him just in time to get an exclusive scoop: He is about to embark on a very ambitious growth campaign. Condon says he has received a green light from REVShare’s primary investors, global private equity firms the Carlyle Group and H.I.G. Ventures, to use acquisitions not only to grow the core television business but to expand REVShare’s reach across all media platforms. He has retained RBC Capital Markets to approach and help analyze a list of target companies that he would like to acquire. Before discussing “things as they will be,” however, we began with things as they are. Electronic Retailer: Is REVShare’s model purely payper-response, with no ifs, ands or buts? Yes. Unless somebody responds to the call to action, there is no bill to the marketer and no revenue to share with the affiliates. That’s why placement is so important. The highest bid per lead doesn’t necessarily get all the best avails. We test our commercials for response rates before we do a national rollout, and we update performance data constantly. We use our own algorithms to recommend to affiliates where an ad should run. A marketer who is doing exceptionally well goes to the top of the list and gets

BY JACK GORDON PHOTOS BY BRIAN DAVIS As a 25-year veteran with Time Warner/AOL, Brendan Condon thoroughly understood what he calls performance-based advertising – especially the pay-per-click method by which marketers commonly pay to promote their wares on the Internet. For the last three years of his tenure, he was senior vice president and managing director of AOL’s Londonbased Platform A international advertising divisions. But until he was recruited to become CEO of REVShare, a job he began in March 2010, Condon says, “I didn’t even know that the performance-based advertising model existed on television.” He learned that the model not only exists but has been practiced since 1989 by REVShare. The Temecula, Calif.-based company boasts the largest cost-per-action TV advertising network in North America, with 1,700 affiliated television properties (broadcast stations, cable systems, and syndicators) that reach 110 million English and Spanish-language households in the United States and Canada. The cost-per-action model works like this: REVShare uses a bidding system in which advertisers or their agencies specify a price they will pay for each response to an ad. When the company’s TV affiliates have unsold commercial avails, instead of unloading the time slots at fire-sale prices, they turn them over to REVShare – without having to reveal their effective rates. Using formulas that weigh both the bid prices and the expected response from viewers, REVShare then

June 2011 | electronicRETAILER

Electronic Retailer - June 2011

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