It’s sexy to be a startup these days, right?  It sure seemed so at the 4A’s Transformation Conference, where disruptive ad tech companies converged to hype their stories, share their enthusiasm and appeal to a room full of brand and agency decision makers.  RUN was honored to partake and of course, we’ve embraced the startup term wholeheartedly with swagger and a smile, but truthfully…we have always thought of ourselves as more. 

Perhaps it’s due to the modern day connotation associated with the term Startup, undoubtedly fueled by the dizzying proliferation of Startups popping up in general, but the sentiment that I’ve sensed from naysayers, onlookers and employees of bigger companies seems to be that if you’re a Startup then you’re an Upstart, a little engine that could...it conjures up an image of a cute little company that tries hard, deserving of a pat on the head then sent on its way to marginalization, obscurity, then bust - and that’s where we draw the line and say…enough!  

Fact is, thanks to the power of technology, so called startups like ours are not just capable of competing and surviving but thriving, beating the big boys and taking their candy.  We’re not just a startup, we’re a business; a rapidly growing company solving the hardest ad tech challenges that others before us couldn’t or wouldn't.  

Simply put, we and companies like ours who are committed to continuous innovation and disruption, are better.  We don’t just try harder than a lot of the bigger, more stale, more bureaucratic, less innovative, less agile outfits that we affectionately refer to as legacy companies. Our technology is better, our ideas are smarter, our people more creative, our purpose more passionate and we wake up every day thinking about how we can make a real difference.  

Six months ago, RUN presented at the 4A’s conference in New York City. We were the only company that was willing to stand on stage, execute a live programmatic media buy and then display real-time analytics that parsed exactly what we had purchased, where it was purchased and how it performed.

Today, RUN is back on stage at Transformation LA: The Idea Effect, a conference sponsored by the 4A’s, AOL, and Techcrunch. We were nominated as one of five of the most disruptive media technologies and asked to participate because we were willing to show an audience something we do every day: help our clients make sense of and monetize the data we have at our fingertips, with full transparency and up-to-the-second speed.

We understand what it means to be a disruptive force in the industry. Innovation is not something that happens once. Evolution is an ongoing process that continues in perpetuity, and if we are to not only survive but thrive in the ad tech ecosystem we need to not only be responsive to the needs and wants of our client base but also anticipate those needs and build solutions today for the problems of twelve months from now. To be a truly disruptive technology, we need to disrupt ourselves continuously. We need to refine our internal processes, continue to attract and challenge fresh talent and, of course, expand our already advanced mobile advertising solutions platform.

Readers of The B-Side know that RUN is ahead of its time. We have built first party data activation products for desktop and mobile. We have built a self-updating Cookie Translator that can take mobile or desktop cookies with limited shelf-lives and translate them into persistent mobile identifiers, enabling clients to extend reach on their most valuable audiences and cross screens in a way that was previously believed to be impossible. We continue to improve the accuracy of our geo-location intelligence with every product cycle we complete, using proprietary heuristics beyond exchange-derived data. And we have a three-fold approach for mobile conversion attribution that tackles post-click and post-view attribution for both in-app and mobile web inventory. We will standardize and weave common threads between all screens.

We see ourselves as a consolidation point: one system that runs any digital campaign, be it direct, rich media, video, mobile or desktop. We still have the analytics to track every aspect of our campaigns in real time with full transparency, but to truly empower our partners we have to keep pushing ourselves to do more.  That’s our promise: we will.