Personalization: The Future in Advertising

When Peter Reitano and Jeff Goldenberg, founders of Abacus Agency, (Toronto, Canada and New York City) an Ad Tech/agency hybrid that specializes in Facebook and Instagram advertising, they saw problems in the traditional agency model. They reverse engineered their organization from a vision of what a future agency would be like, noting that, in today's fast-paced technology world, you can't build for today, because, by the time you get the work done, what you have will be out of date—you need to look ahead 3 or 4 years and design for the future.   Abacus targets better ROI/conversion on Facebook and Instagram advertising spend for large brands or Series A tech companies. They maintain a tight focus on this market segment because they believe that this enables them to be extremely good at that one thing and provides the flexibility of being able to refer as needed to other agencies specializing in areas outside their area of expertise. This collaborative synergy works because partner companies provide referrals to Abacus, knowing that Abacus doesn't want all the business and won't cannibalize referred clients.   Peter and Jeff expect the future integration of more personal "smart devices" and the rise of increasingly choice-driven content (e.g., Netflix, Facebook, Amazon, Google vs. traditional broadcasters) will bring greater personalization of advertising content. In particular, they predict that smartphone advertising will increase due to the pervasiveness, the highly personal nature, and the amount of time people spend looking at these "second screens "—and a high percentage of social is mobile.   Peter and Jeff can be reached on their company website at: abacus.agency, and on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn. They have a great blog on their website and can be reached by email at: [email protected].