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IPO Hopeful 8 – Secret Source for Scaling?
Continuing from the last post, Terry—who looked like an uncle figure at your family dinner table—had an air of casual ease that made it hard to imagine he held such immense control over brand and advertising channels. 😂
I asked, “How do you find all these independent brands and small business owners to continuously advertise on your tablets? Doesn’t that require a massive team of account managers to negotiate deals one by one? That sounds so inefficient.”
He chuckled. “You really don’t know anything about the advertising world huh? Let me explain how this industry works. Digital advertising has a few major hubs—think Google and other big platforms you know. We started with Google. Platforms like this have centralized ad exchanges, where anyone who wants to advertise can bid for the locations, spaces, and time slots they want. So, we don’t go looking for local brands and independent business owners. They come to us through the exchange.”
Naturally, I asked, “So how do you get listed as a provider on Google’s ad exchange?”
His face lit up with amusement. “Now that was a bit of a journey. It took us eight months to get approved because, before us, Google didn’t even have a category for ‘hotel ad spaces.’ We were the first to do this at scale. Initially, Google rejected our application outright because their system flagged us as fraudulent. Imagine hundreds of thousands of devices with unique IPs all registered to the same owner—it looked like a scam. They just ignored us.
That’s when I called in a favor from an old colleague, someone who used to head Google’s global advertising division. It took him eight months of conversations with his former teammates and a lot of explaining to prove we were legitimate. Eventually, Google added us to their ad exchange. We’re now the only supplier in their new ‘hotel ad spaces’ category. 😂”
I was fascinated. “So, how long have you been live? What’s the demand like?”
Terry grinned. “You’re asking the right questions. We only went live last week. Guess how many ad requests we received on the first day?”
I guessed, “A few thousand? Tens of thousands?”
He laughed. “Try 250,000 ad bids. In just one day. Can you believe it?”
I was floored. “That number speaks for itself.”
He continued, “And keep in mind, this is still during Google’s trial phase for us—they’ve only opened a small fraction of their traffic to test things out. Once it’s fully open, imagine the scale we’re talking about. Oh, and by the way, Google already invited us to be a partner. They want us to co-host advertising roadshows with them for promotion. 😁”
Terry then added, “And that’s just the non-brand ads! The direct-to-advertiser segment is an entirely different beast.”
Seeing my puzzled expression, he said, “Alright, let me explain it for a newbie like you. Think about the big luxury brands—Hermès, Louis Vuitton, Bvlgari, Van Cleef & Arpels etc. They want precision, scale, and access to high-net-worth individuals in real-time. We’re the only supplier who can provide that, and our audience consists of people with immediate purchasing intent.
But here’s the thing—we don’t need to negotiate directly with these brands. Instead, we work with the media buyers who handle those brands’ global ad budgets. There are only a handful of firms that manage all these major brands, and we’ve been in this industry long enough to know them all. This approach—direct-to-advertiser—means we can offer Hermès the opportunity to reach tens of thousands of affluent guests at Waldorf Astoria hotels worldwide every day. Do you think they’d say no to that?”
😂 I couldn’t help but marvel. They had taken the existing hotel assets—guests with strong spending power and the pocket to do so—and turned them into entirely new ad spaces through their tablets. These ad slots were instant and available at scale—thousands in each city at any given time. It’s no wonder this was so attractive to global brands, local businesses, and even governments.
I asked, “What about the numbers? With so many clients, how does it all reflect in revenue?”
Terry smiled. “Ah, it’s all comes down to the numbers”. Till next time!