Jeremy Weisz 16:54
yeah. And so I’m just going to show from a place. Investment perspective. Okay, you can see there’s, obviously, there’s an article here in Benzinga, people are reading it. And then there’s these ad units that are Thanks for reading, and they’re compelling deals, right? And this is powered by Goloot. Another example would be if someone signs up for a newsletter, right? Because people are underutilizing their thank you page, newsletter page, so a lot of people have nothing there, right?
So this, you know, I as an example, I sent you could sign up for a site, and you can see, thanks for registering, as a thank you. It’s a nice thank you for the Persan registering. And also its prime real estate right there. And you can see there’s constant contact, CB, wine program, Amazon music. And this is also powered by Goloot. What about from the product side? Was there any iteration or evolution from the beginning, like right now, we see what you’ve done over the past three years. Has it stayed pretty much the same, or has it evolved?
Lucas Béland 20:44
It’s evolved a lot. We have about four or five. We went from like having only one web format to four or five. I think now we’re going to get close to 10, actually different web formats that publishers can integrate on all of their pages to show our offers. And the core nature of our business is optimizing for performance, right? So we pride ourselves in certain specific APIs that I want to share with you, Jeremy. Our ad units across all of our content sites, and we have substantial data to back that up, because we reach 30 million shoppers every single month in Canada and the US with those ads every month, so we get a lot of people clicking on those ads.
On average, for a content site like Benzinga or whomever, we will increase engagement by 16 100% compared to standard banners. That’s not a small jump. That’s an enormous jump. So users showing appreciation for our ad unit and then tangibly interacting with it is a significant milestone. And on average, from a conversion standpoint, we increase conversion for advertisers by about 900% compared to standard display. So the effectiveness of ad spend is so much more significant on our channel than it can be anywhere else, and this helps the publishers make more money because we can justify a premium, and it helps us, of course, justify our value proposition to our clients, to get them to adopt our platform. And so why do I mention these KPIs? It’s because, from a product standpoint, the thing that we wake up with in the morning and go to bed with at night is optimizing for performance, building the best possible ads, and we, over the course of two or three years, have done a lot of research and development and continue to do so to try to understand what gets people clicking.
And some of these ideas that we’ve had is like, hey, we realized when we introduced offers on a content site like L or Benzinga or whatever, not a lot of people were clicking on it at the beginning. It was good, but it could have been better. And one of the ideas that we had is it needs to look like it comes from the publisher. People trust Forbes, people trust Wall Street Journal, people trust L Magazine. They don’t trust offers because they’ve been burned so many times on the internet with these scams that are pretending to be a value add, but they’re not. And so we built our ad units to look and feel and I think it’s especially true in this Benzinga example, to look and feel like they’re given to you by Benzinga, the fonts are very similar to the content.
The call to actions are in color, very similar to the web page. Even Benzinga logo is leveraged at the ad unit level to reinforce that trust. So we try to implement all these changes and really understand why are users clicking versus not? And this is what our product team has been doing every day, and there have been 1000s and 1000s and 1000s of iterations to come up with this formula today that works, but there’s still a lot of work ahead. So yeah.
Jeremy Weisz 22:15
So we talked the publisher side. Okay, now you need advertisers, all right? And these advertisers are getting approached all the time from people, right? So it’s not so easy to be like, hey, Uber, I want some Advent. Okay, so let’s talk through on the advertiser side. Now you have these publishers, you need the advertisers, and we mentioned a bunch here, and you could see them. If you’re watching the screen, you can see Uber, Footlocker, or crocs, Uber Eats, Vistaprint fanatics, Puma, all these. Let’s talk about Foot Locker for a second. Yeah, how did that work? How did you get full locker?
Lucas Béland 24:39
Yeah, a lot of the biz dev that we do is via agencies primarily, right? So agencies manage a brand’s ad budget. So we don’t necessarily always go direct to the brand. We will work with the agency partner to try and acquire that customer. And you will be surprised, maybe not, actually — Jeremy, to hear that this industry, for the past 20 years, everybody’s been selling the same thing and everybody’s been giving to these brands the same message. I like to consider the past 20 years in the advert digital advertising space to be a race to the bottom, meaning every single ad network came to agencies and brands with the same ad units, but they always try to make it cheaper. Somehow, they found a way to make your CPC a 10th of a quarter of a cent cheaper.
And brands are buying into, again, that race to the bottom, and there’s been some optimization from a data and targeting standpoint, but ultimately, the user experience remains the same. When I started this business, and again, there’s a huge component of luck and timing, the legislative landscape of North America was changing dramatically. Apple took down the IDFA from its ecosystem in 2021 which sent the entire industry in a downward spiral to found new ways to acquire customers. Safari took down cookies a couple of months later, again, the entire industry goes in a downward spiral to find new ways to require more customers. And Facebook’s advertising revenue was declining for the first time in two decades, and I came in again in this momentum with the brand new value proposition, and we found that on the demand side, agencies and advertisers were creaming for diversification.
They were craving for new ways to require customers that were privacy compliant, that were cookieless, that were maybe more modern, more user friendly, more respectful of the end user. And then I would say the last lucky bit for me as an entrepreneur, which timing is everything right, if you think of all these larger companies as well that came before my time, they were all lucky in their own way in the Canadian landscape. More specifically, Facebook got in this immense war against the Canadian government and banned local content sites from their platform. And agencies and brands in Canada rallied around Canadian content publishers, think the CBC.
So they came in broadcasting channel and said, hey, we’re going to allocate a certain percentage of our ad spend to you to keep you alive. And we came in as like, hey, we’re an ad network made up of all these content sites, why don’t you start working with us? So again, there was a lot of market momentum and a lot of signs that showed that Goloot had, even before its product, significant product market fit, and our pitch to advertisers was quite easy, because other than getting a cold beer and a pizza, agencies had seen nothing new from these ad networks that were ruling the ad landscape for the past 20 years. So that’s been our strategy on the demand side, and it’s been working out really, really well so far for our clients. And we can talk more about that Foot Locker example. Of course, I’m happy to walk you through some of these use cases.
Jeremy Weisz 27:44
Let’s talk about Foot Locker. But first I can see the value proposition, right? You’re like, hey, we can get your clients more customers, right, and put you on these platforms. We already have relationships with these publishers. So what types of agencies are ideal for you, like someone’s listening. I have a lot of agency owners on or listen and they’re thinking, Oh, this may be interesting for our clients. What type of agencies are a good fit to contact you, to possibly work with some of their brands?
Lucas Béland 28:16
Absolutely. So I think the cherry on the Sunday, which will also answer your question about the agency fit is that we, because we get such an impressive yield in performance compared to standard display, we work with our clients on performance only. So we don’t charge impression based fees or CPM. We don’t charge flat fee to promote you on our network. We charge brands for outcomes, which is either a click to your websites or the acquisition of traffic or the acquisition of an email some of these ad units that you were looking at, Jeremy, when you click on one of these offers, you just can type in their email, and they’ll be able to and may not apply to any other ones you’re looking at. But sometimes you can type in your email, and we’ll acquire that email on behalf of our client, natively within the content. So we will sell that email to the clients as from a lead generation standpoint.
So of course, if you look at those performance based strategies, our clients have primarily been performance agencies or media agencies, right? Those who are responsible for ad spend and are looking for ways to get more traffic to their brands, to get more emails in their mailing list. So those CRM-based strategies to get more sales on their e-commerce. This is what brands come to us with. And as I said, the cherry on the Sunday to wrap up that pitch, we told our clients, you want to test this out, we’ll only charge you on outcomes, because I get such an impressive yield again in performance that my business model makes sense. If I was getting the same performance as standard display, I would have to be charging you those ridiculously expensive CPM fees or whatnot. So some of our agency partners include Densu Omnicom Media Group.
We work with cassette a lot in the Canadian market as well. So we have a lot of very, very large agencies that come to us, but also these hyper local, much smaller media agencies. They come to us with one or two accounts, and we provide managed services to these agencies to help them on board, on our network, start driving that tangible result with performance for their clients.
Jeremy Weisz 30:11
Awesome. Yeah, it’s a no brainer. You have your pitch down. When you talk about outcomes, it’s like, what’s, what’s the what’s the risk, right?
Lucas Béland 30:20
What’s the catch?
Jeremy Weisz 30:21
So for Foot Locker, what did you do with them?
Lucas Béland 30:25
Foot Locker came to us with the traditional goal of wanting to acquire more customers in Canada and from an e-commerce standpoint, right? So they provide it to our network. What typically happens is, like this exclusive offer, like a 10 or 15% off site wide offer, and it varies. Brands have a lot of flexibility to AB test discounts and whatnot, and they were hoping that gold’s platform would excel at driving low funnel results, right? So an incremental growth in their e commerce sales, and we were able to deliver a lot of that, and the campaign exceeded its target ROAs, I think we reached like seven to one return on ad spend with them in the first few months. Consistently, Foot Locker has been acquiring customers and spending money on our network for about a year and a half now, and they haven’t stopped.
And what was even more impressive is the fact that about half of the audience that we acquired for Footlocker, and this is data I can share with you, is we have a public common use case. Half of the audience that we acquired for Footlocker were new to file shoppers in Canada. They were new customers that I had never shopped before at Foot Locker. And this is the power of content, in my opinion, content is a place of inspiration where people don’t have their mind made up yet, but they’re looking to get inspired for their next purchase. And when we target the right users in the right articles, reading the right content about sports or whatever, then Footlocker becomes a natural extension of that content, and you can find shoppers that you’ve never interacted with, as opposed to social that can be quite saturated.
Foot Locker found a really, really interesting, scalable, new to file driven acquisition channel with us. And of course, once you see these results come in then the brands. It’s like a no-brainer to keep spending. We were so aggressive in the beginning because we were venture backed as well. We disrupted the industry. We were like, hey, we want your budget. We believe in our product. If you give us a good offer, we know what we can do. We’ll guarantee return on ad spend to you. If you don’t make a positive return on this campaign, we’ll get you your money back. Friends were like, okay, Lucas, like, I’ll throw money at you, but I was betting on some fundamental metrics that I knew if I got them this impression and this click, it would convert in that range.
If it didn’t, then I basically had no value prop anyway. So it was a bet against my own product, and those bets paid off big time. And we continue to approach some of our clients with these very aggressive strategies to be like, hey, give us a good offer. We’ll guarantee that you will see those net positive returns. And in my opinion, if a net network’s not selling you that they don’t really believe in their own product, and you might get burned. So, this was our approach, and it worked well for Foot Locker. And look at them scaling with us today.
Jeremy Weisz 33:01
So, Lucas, we have a little bit of time left, and I have 72 questions here, but I want to rapid fire a little bit we talk about the growth side. Okay, and one of the ways you get out in front is industry events. Talk about some of your favorites industry event you like to attend.
Lucas Béland 33:23
Absolutely. So we do a lot of performance marketing events. Shop Talk is definitely one of the best ones, and I’ll be there in a week from now. So if this podcast comes out in a timely fashion, some people can reach out, because I will be roaming Vegas in search of new partnerships and making new friends as well. So I’m happy to connect with anybody. So Shop Talk definitely tops that list. I love a lot of the affiliate conferences. Think of like CJU which is a con. It’s a private event, so it’s invite only. It’s a bit harder to get.
Jeremy Weisz 33:53
That’s Commission Junctions conference.
Lucas Béland 33:55
Correct. Commission Junction conference, for their top driving channels. So publishers and brands. You make incredible friends and connections there in Santa Barbara every year. So I love CJU. I’ll be there again this year. So of course, we attend like the Rakuten event, Affiliate Summit is a great conference, especially the West one PI Live, which is another performance marketing conference.
You get a lot of retailers, a lot of brands looking to acquire more customers and diversify their strategies. It’s very performance driven. Think CPC, CPA partnerships, email acquisition partnerships, which is where we excel. And yeah. So these are a bunch of conferences that I’ll be attending. I told you, about 10 a year is what I like to keep it down to. So almost a trip a month.
Jeremy Weisz 34:40
Is it just you, or do you have other team members that go with you?
Lucas Béland 34:44
I typically try to get other team members, but depending on the nature of the conference, it’ll be me. Sometimes I don’t even go right? So I’ll personally do 10 sometimes I bring other team members, like I’ll be going with someone else to Shop Talk on my team, on the sell side, but there’s a lot of local H. And see events. We’re an IB Canada member. Very proud IB Canada member. We sit on the different types of boards as well, from a data privacy standpoint.
Jeremy Weisz 35:09
What does that stand for? What’s IB Canada?
Lucas Béland 35:11
IB is the International Advertising Bureau, and so it is the sort of the Constitution of the advertising landscape, its founding fathers are Facebook and alphabet and the large ad networks and they provide the guiding principles and the guiding rules of advertising when it comes to standards and formats and privacy and this and that, and they force mediate with every government, whether it’s the US government, Canadian government. So most of the larger quote, unquote, ad networks are IAB members, and gold is one of them in Canada. So we go to a lot of industry events in Canada, and my sales team will represent us there.
Jeremy Weisz 35:49
So another question is, you mentioned you really have advisors and mentors, and so who are some of those? I know you mentioned Mitch Garber, obviously peers, who you brought on, who are some of the other advisors or industry veterans that you look to?
Lucas Béland 36:10
I mean, the biggest contributors to our journey have undoubtedly been the talent that is on our team. Today, we have some phenomenal people, whether it’s my head of product, Alex who, Alex Gurigan, is his full name, who is a repeat founder, has a lot of retail and Tech experience and leading products from the earliest stages to scale. My CTO is a phenomenal person. Jacques Rego, he is an experienced, again leader in the tech space, a very knowledgeable developer. And I respect all these individuals for different reasons, right? And anyone else on our team, whether it’s Alexandra, who runs all of our networks, she has like, 10 plus years of experience in advertising, I have someone leading all of my publishers business, Emil, his name is he’s a industry veteran with 20 plus years of experience. Used to be a vice president at share through the very, very, very large ad exchange that everybody knows. So, yeah, I love all these people, and they’re undoubtedly the best advisors to me as a founder. Of course, our investors can’t, not talk about them.
The lead investor in the company, who’s I like to consider my father in business, quote, unquote, is Joel Lianoff. Joel is the founder of Paysafe, which is a multi-billion dollar FinTech company that was started originally in Montreal, scaled to 3000 plus employees. I met Joel when pace, if went public on the NASDAQ, $9 billion IPO. You can imagine the gentleman was doing very well for himself at that time, and he was such an inspirational leader, and always has been. And he is a very involved in our journey. So is his right hand man, Danny Chasinoff, who used to be the COO of Paysafe. So then, 30 plus year industry veteran, phenomenal tech leader that went from the stage of ideation to bringing this company public, one of the largest successors in Canada, and there are many others, right? So we have the previous vice president of Cassette Media, the agency and use also used to be the president of group M Excel.
I have the chief legal officer of L’Oreal on my investor list. Her name is Naza Petrolito. She’s L’Oreal’s global Council based in Paris. We have the CEO of Cadillac Fairview, which is one of the largest real estate, commercial real estate companies in the world. So they do all these malls in Canada, like Eden center in Toronto with them. So there’s so much to talk about.
Jeremy Weisz 38:30
Talk about Joel for a second, I mean, because I wanted to talk about the fundraising side and the lesson learned, and I think it’d be a good place to talk about Joel and how you actually met him and actually formed that relationship, that he invested and taking a risk on any startup, but taking a risk on 18 year old startup.
Lucas Béland 38:51
Yeah. Clearly, Joel wasn’t a student of ageism. So he believed in the individual first and foremost. And I think that’s the underlying thesis for all of his investments, right? It thinks like a good founder, which I hope to qualify for one day. I think I’m work in progress. Let’s put it this way, a good founder can take a bad product to market and turn it into a success. The bad founder can take a great product and throw it in the trash, right? So it’s his premise, and it’s his thesis, and he’s really stuck by this whole career, which is something that I think is remarkable. I met Joel when I was super young. I was a student still through 1000 different connections, honestly, like, there is this.
There was various layers between a guy born and raised in Montreal I was fortunate enough to go to private school and this and that. So I luckily, I have parents who were both in the banking industry, and they did well for themselves. But between that and one of Canada’s top founder, multi-billion dollar exit, there’s like a trillion million layers. So I went from one person to the other, to the other, to the other two, up until someone decided that I should be taking coffee with a man, a gentleman that I mentioned, called Danny Chasanov. And Danny gave me a Saturday coffee or Sunday coffee in his whole neighborhood in Montreal. And I went for coffee with Danny, and he left my story, and he left my pitch. And back then, 2020 2021, these guys had just IPO. It was money craze.
Everybody was investing spending money. It’s not the current state of the market. It was very different as you know, it was the Bitcoin era. Everybody was making so much money they didn’t know what to do with it. So these guys were looking to give back to Montreal and to support young founders that were coming up with new ideas. And they loved what I was working on. Danny eventually got me to Joel, and Joel gave me nothing but a 15 minutes in his office meeting. I missed an exam from school because of that meeting. I’d made the decision because Joel was late, rightfully so. Honestly, Joe was late, and I made the decision like, do I go back to school now, or do I wait for Joel and miss this exam? And I decided to miss the exam and wait for Joel, just the best decision of my life.
And Joel gave me 15 minutes, and he loved it. He invited me again the following week, and he made a proposition to invest, but kind of like a shark approach, in the sense of, like, I want X percentage of your company. I want to become a partner. I want to become a mentor. I’ll give you a bit of money. What do you want to do with this money? And it wasn’t a bit, it was actually quite a substantial amount. And I told him, look, I’ll take this money and I’ll raise double, because I think with you and with your network, we can do a lot more together. And he left that passion and that energy, and often the races we win. So again, connections, relationships, 1000s of meetings, finally got me to Joel at some point and made the best impression in 15 minutes that got him to want to invest more in me as a human being.
Jeremy Weisz 41:44
Lucas, I’m excited to follow your journey. Thanks for sharing the lessons on the journey. So much more to cover, but so little time. I want to encourage people to go to goloot.io and it really reminds me, Lucas of when I had on Tara Bosch, who started Smart Suites, who was early in the industry, really didn’t have just wanted to reinvent candy and didn’t have industry knowledge. But that kind of is an advantage, and I remember interviewing her, and then hearing the story later on that she was acquired for $360 million and so just an amazing story, and that just reminds me a lot of this story. So anyways, everyone check out goloot.io. If you know someone, a publisher, an agency, a brand that this would benefit, send it their way, and Lucas, I want to be the first one to thank you. Thanks so much.
Lucas Béland 42:48
Well, thank you, Jeremy, for your time. Talk soon.
