1. What is your background and how did you make it over to Permuto?

Navdeep Saini: I have been working in the online advertising industry for about 12 – 13 years now. At DoubleClick we recognized that the web, as an emerging publishing medium, could not sustain the wide availability of free content without some form of monetization opportunity for publishers. DoubleClick pioneered solutions for both publishers and advertisers.  The platform we built back then today still handles a significant percentage of the Web's online advertising traffic. After DoubleClick, I moved over to Yahoo’s Search Marketing division, where I participated in building Panama, Yahoo’s successful effort to integrate and re-engineer the Overture Search Marketing technology that Yahoo had acquired, and today generates the majority of Yahoo’s revenue. After working in both display and search advertising extensively I recognized that there was an enormous opportunity to combine the best parts of each of these into a completely new advertising model, bringing together the economics and effectiveness of search marketing with the reach of display advertising. Shaukat (Shamim, CEO), Stanley (Wong, VP of Product Marketing), and I discussed opportunities around this new model and decided to form the company Permuto to bring this powerful vision to reality.

2. What new technologies has Permuto developed to connect shoppers, brands and publishers?

Navdeep Saini: Permuto has built a unique platform that creates a one-stop shop for marketers to reach the optimum audience for their offers with compelling display ads. Permuto calculates an ActiveShopper Score™ for web audiences to determine level of interest in different shopping categories and price points. Advertisers can easily place ads in the Permuto network by providing us with a periodic feed of their products, for which Permuto will find the most appropriate audience. This audience is shown Permuto’s highly effective dynamic personalized advertising creatives built from a merchant's product catalog and targeted using our  proprietary machine learning relevance models. The platform also provides campaign management, budget controls, and detailed analytics. 3. How are these unique, or how do they differ from what was currently available?

Navdeep Saini: You can find companies that offer bits and pieces that overlap with aspects of Permuto’s product, but Permuto is offering the first integrated solution designed specifically for the unique needs of the shopping vertical.

4. What is the significance of open source for what you are working on?

Navdeep Saini: All of Permuto’s product is built on open source technologies. We extensively use well-tested tools that have been around for a long time like Linux, Apache, PHP, Perl, MySQL. We also use more cutting edge open source tools like Hadoop and Hive for our large data processing and analytics jobs. The open source community has produced many high quality, well-tested, and innovative foundational technologies for the internet. 5. How does Permuto display ads with effective targeting throughout its publisher network?

Navdeep Saini: As mentioned earlier, Permuto uses machine learning relevance models, which take into account Permuto’s proprietary ActiveShopper™ Score and other factors, such as publisher, time of day, frequency capping, and creative effectiveness to produce highly relevant ads. Our dynamic ad creatives feature rich information such as product ratings, price comparisons, and discounts along with product images.

6. How can Permuto scale this service, while remaining, what you call “brand safe”?

Navdeep Saini: There is plenty of inventory on the internet which is not objectionable to our advertisers. Permuto carefully chooses all inventory to protect the brands of our partners.

7. What makes the ‘ActiveShopper’ feature so effective? How targeted is it?

Navdeep Saini: The ActiveShopper™ feature computes consumers’ shopping interest at different points in the buying process, which helps us to find the optimal audience for a given offer from our advertisers’ catalogs and target them. The targeting is very fine-grained, including such features as price point and brand affinity.

8. There’s been a lot of talk about Google and Yahoo! and what seems like the beginning of a protracted battle over display advertising. How will a company like Permuto stand out from the turnkey solutions, for brands and for publishers

Navdeep Saini: While there are some big players in this industry, it is still young and there will be many innovations and new technologies to come. The market is big enough to support many companies. Advertisers should not put all of their eggs in one basket and as they experiment with alternatives to the bigger names in the industry, we believe they will adjust their spend according to the effectiveness of the solution.

9. What would you tell advertisers that have had poor results with display in the past; or are content with their search campaign?

Navdeep Saini: Traditional display advertising solutions largely target based on criteria like site demographics, DMA, and day parting. The creatives are mostly static and involve an expensive development process. Measurement of campaign effectiveness and ROI is relatively poor. Permuto’s ShopperConnect™  platform determines the users that are currently in the market for the products an advertiser sells, finds them across the web, and presents them with rich dynamic ad creatives that help build the advertiser’s brand while showing highly relevant and personalized offers from their catalog. This platform provides detailed analytics for measuring campaign effectiveness and ROI. This is a completely different model from traditional display advertising where the ads are largely static, so we would encourage advertisers who have had a bad experience with the old model to try the ShopperConnect™ platform. Advertisers who are happy with their search advertising campaign will be even happier with ShopperConnect™. They will find that their ShopperConnect™ campaigns are at least as effective, if not more, but with greater reach and much more attractive creatives.

10. How has the advertising technology evolved in the last decade and how does this affect Permuto’s development? Navdeep Saini: When I started out in this industry, of course, the hardware was much less powerful, most development was done using 32-bit operating systems, and multi-processor machines were a rare and expensive commodity. Distributed computing applications required extensive custom development. What’s astonishing today is that we talk about tools like Hadoop processing large volumes of data on “commodity hardware”, but what we consider “commodity hardware” today is a cluster of dual quad-core machines with 16 GB of RAM. The hardware and software tools advances of the last two or three years alone have made it easier, relatively, to develop products and services that process large amounts of data and support a large transaction volume with extremely high reliability. Permuto has benefited greatly from having an experienced team that knows the needs of the advertising space and has the luxury of a clean slate design and architecture.