While his company strives to position itself as a leader in “conversational advertising,” Troy Young, the Canadian-born president of San Francisco’s Say Media (formerly VideoEgg), came to Toronto last week to help set up its new office and meet with agencies and clients in the country he says is a “very big part” of his business.
“We’re working with all of the agencies and many big clients… They loved us for the cost-per-engagement VideoEgg model, and now we’re saying we can make programs that are more interesting and more social,” said Young, whose company announced the acquisition of social media developer Six Apart in September.
Six Apart developed the blogging/social media platforms TypePad and Movable Type, as well as a sizeable social media ad network that reaches an estimated 90 million unique visitors a month in the U.S. alone.
Young said VideoEgg’s acquisition of Six Apart and the subsequent name change to Say Media were meant to shift media buyers’ perception of VideoEgg as a company operating primarily in the video advertising space to one actively engaged in social media.
He called the new entity “a melding of attention and influence” with a focus on offering marketers the opportunity to participate in conversational advertising.
“It enables [marketers] to ask consumers questions and get them involved in a dialogue,” he said.
“We have a blogging platform where we can tie an advertising platform together in a social hub [and] a very robust blogging platform called TypePad used by hundreds of thousands of people that’s still an excellent product for bloggers of all types.”
The newly rechristened company, which has 300 employees and offices in 10 cities including Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal, claims more than 345 million unique visitors each month worldwide (including 17 million in Canada).
Say Media’s current Canadian client roster includes several prominent companies such as Rogers/Fido, Ford, Mercedes Benz and RIM.
