During Advertising Week in New York, Jay Sears (left) of Rubicon Project; Ryan Davis of The Weather Company; Tim Daugherty of Lonely Planet and Al Maitland (right) of Kijiji appeared at a program titled $50B Left Behind: Capturing SMB Spend.
Your Name:Ryan Davis
Your Company:The Weather Company
Your Title:Vice President, Local Platform
SEARS: What do you read to keep up with politics, art and culture?
DAVIS: Wall Street Journal, New York Times, ESPN and increasingly Facebook.
SEARS: What do you read to keep up with friends?
DAVIS: Facebook, iMessages, and emails from a 15-year-old ongoing email chain of college friends.
SEARS: What do you read to keep up with our industry?
DAVIS: Business Insider, Crunchbase, Magid Reports, Twitter, Google News Alerts
SEARS: What’s your favorite commercial of all time?
DAVIS: I have a friend who does a perfect impression of the Hump Day Camel (Geico). It makes me laugh every time.
SEARS: With regards to self-service advertising automation, what are The Weather Company’s three biggest company-wide initiatives for the remainder of 2015 and into 2016?
DAVIS:
- Scaling our local partner reseller initiatives
- Growing programmatic direct
- Taking our local model international
SEARS: Self-service advertising is used in a variety of customer use cases. Which of the following use cases apply to your current business?
- Walk-up business from small and medium size businesses
- Small and mid-size agencies
- Specialized markets (such as bed and breakfasts for a travel publisher or home appraisal services for a real estate publisher)
- Vendor or co-op advertising
- International markets
- Other: Enabling local resell partners to sell to SMBs
DAVIS: A, B, E and F. I’m particularly focused on enabling hundreds of local sellers around the country to sell the power of The Weather Channel to local businesses. For me, self-service is really about a tool to empower resellers. To reach the true local business that doesn’t have an agency, the guidance and insight provided by these local sellers is a critical layer on top of “self-service.”
SEARS: What are some of The Weather Company’s unique assets and/or advertiser value propositions you are able to leverage using a self-service system?