Sitting Down with Former Goldman Sachs Banker, Colin Darretta

I had the pleasure of interviewing Colin Darretta, a former Goldman Sachs banker turned founder of DojoMojo, a SaaS Adtech hybrid. They’ve built a platform with over 5,000 brands using the technology populated with many household names like Hearst, Casper, General Assembly, Reebok and others.

Chris: Thank you so much for doing this with us! What is your “backstory” of how you become involved in the adtech or digital media space?

“Before DojoMojo I founded an eCommerce business, WellPath, with the goal of providing nutritionist level supplement customization at prices comparable to what you would find in Whole Foods or GNC. It was during the process of building that business that I made a classic first time entrepreneur mistake widely dubbed the field of dreams fallacy, the misbegotten belief that “if you build it, they will come.” In our case, despite good press and what we believed to be an innovative idea the customers did not materialize from the ether and start beating down our doors. Since we had not allocated a significant amount of capital for marketing we were forced to get scrappy. Ultimately, that led us to building what would eventually become DojoMojo, a SaaS/Adtech platform that enabled one to find brands to run Partnership Marketing campaigns with. Fast forward two years later and we have nearly 5,000 brands using DojoMojo to facilitate all manner of partnerships to grow their businesses — email acquisition, content swaps, dedicated email swaps, sweepstakes, box insert swaps and myriad more. At this point we’ve driven over 100 million leads to the brands that use our tech.”

Chris: What do you think is the most interesting thing that has happened to the industry thus far?

“The extraordinarily quick rise of Google and Facebook and the speed with which they have come to dominate digital ad spending. According to eMarketer the two businesses took in excess of 60% of all digital ad investment in 2017. Equally as importantly they increasingly soak up the lion’s share of the growth in digital ad investment from year to year. This has resulted in second order effects like the default belief amongst many entrepreneurs and advertisers that if you cannot build a product to be sold effectively on Facebook you cannot build a successful product, period. I believe this presumption has resulted in otherwise good business ideas to die on the vine simply because they are not well suited to the Facebook advertising channel.”

Chris: What are your “5 things you think will change or should change over the next 5 years in adtech and digital publishing” and why? Please share a story or example for each.

“While I do not think Google and Facebook are going anywhere I do believe that marketers are more eager than ever to find other channels outside of essentially the tax on all advertising that Facebook and Google take. The way in which I believe this will be happening is increasingly brands are going to recognize the value of working directly with other brands to cross pollinate their audiences. Technology will be built to enable this sharing of audience such that brands will not rely upon going through Facebook or Google to reach eyeballs but rather will work directly with other brands who already have the attention of their target audience. In this way brands like Equinox and Reebok, with similar target audiences but largely noncompetitive products, could work together and share data and audience. The technology layer that will facilitate this sort of audience and data sharing represents a huge opportunity of which the surface has only been scratched. These initiatives will ultimately not replace Facebook and Google but will provide marketers another tool in the toolbox in an environment where increasingly many marketers feel the tools that can actually drive measurable results have been decreasing.

All of this will be accelerated as the symbiotic relationship between the major CPG players and television networks (with one helping prop the other up) continues to erode and less targeted forms of advertising like television that used to be focused on fluffy concepts like brand awareness lose share to digital channels. The online CPG brands will continue to nip at the heels of the traditional incumbents, taking away market share while consumer attention will continue to be sucked away from traditional media channels. There will be unexpected beneficiaries, like email, which remains one of the last free means of reaching a very specific individual and holding their attention for any length of time.

So to recap, (1) Google and Facebook are going to continue to be behemoths, (2) businesses are going to look for unexplored channels outside of Google and Facebook to reach potential customers, (3) some of those channels will involve more direct relationships with other brands that enable audience sharing while (4) everyone will get a lift from the accelerated depreciation of the old advertising models and (5) in the face of all this change some unexpected channels (like email) will shine again.”

Chris: Tell us something you or your company is doing to stay up to date in adtech (maybe making changes to comply with Better Ads Standards or GDPR, working on your header bidding stack or testing new types of ads)

“As a through line to some of my beliefs on where advertising is going over the next several years we are incredibly focused on enabling brands to connect and build owned audiences through channels that are not Google or Facebook. Said another way, even though a brand might have a million followers on Facebook they still ultimately have to pay Facebook for the right to reach them every single time you wish to reach them. There are remarkably few truly owned channels anymore — the largest of which remain email and recurring traffic. These owned audiences are an incredibly valuable asset for a brand and until recently largely assets that while they may market directly toward they did relatively little with as it related to bartering their owned audience attention with other brands “owned” attention.

Since we’re trying to facilitate these connections and audience sharing amongst brands we’re also very focused on all the discussions taking place in Washington around data privacy and of course the impending GDPR implementation. While we pointedly have waited to expand to Europe until the dust settles around GDPR a bit we are actively starting to put policies into place at DojoMojo to ensure that we’ll be in a position to enter the market in full compliance once we have strong clarity on what that means. For us that has meant attending conferences, workshops and speaking with experts in the space to get a strong sense of the sort of technical standards we need to be building toward.”

Chris: Is there a person in the world, or in the US whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why?

“David Rosenblatt, the CEO of 1stdibs and previously CEO of DoubleClick before its acquisition by Google is someone whom I admire a great deal. We often forget that while Google was the architect of their search product, many of the mechanisms for how they make their money were built using technology they gained in the DoubleClick acquisition. Further, David was one of the first to hone in on what are now broadly accepted pieces of wisdom for building a marketplace — namely understanding the importance of separating the advertiser from the publisher and the audience, allowing publishers to manage their own advertising and finally enabling advertisers to self-serve based on the audiences they wanted to reach. I would credit him with understanding marketplace dynamics as well as anyone and rather than rest on his laurels he’s gone out and built another successful marketplace business in the form of 1st dibs.”