Digital Mag Publishing: Solving The Advertising Problems

Oomph is more than just a digital magazine publishing company which might have something to do with CEO Keith Ahern’s deep tech roots.

I’ve spent my entire career working with multimedia and the internet, from my first job as an engineer with Netscape in 1996.

I was working beside the guy that invented JavaScript. There were people working on bringing in things like CSS and styled text, audio and video. All of that was happening in the time that I was there. The guy that hired me, Mike McCue, started Flipboard.

Back in the late ’90s I was thinking about how to get content across multiple channels. What’s that like? What’s a good experience? That gave me a good foundation for what we are doing today.

Oomph is now six years old.

We’re perhaps best known for digital magazine publishing, a segment that has been challenging for many publishers.

People bought tablets faster than agencies, advertisers and publishers could respond to monetise those eyeballs. There are success stories out there, but there are failures as well due to the low uptake by the consumer.

You can’t just walk into an industry and change it. You’ve really got to learn in order to find the middle ground.

We’ve put all of our learnings into launching a product called Adomatic. It’s a service that takes existing creative, such as print ads, and turns them into interactive ads quickly and cost effectively. It allows publishers to sell tablet and mobile inventory using existing sales channels.

This solves a big problem. There was still a pile of money – despite rumours on the contrary – in print advertising that was not converting over to digital fast enough, or in large enough amounts. Adomatic uses existing relationships and creative. It looks so great, you won’t believe it when you see the animated output.

We’ve created something complex that looks simple. But behind the scenes, it does an awful lot of clever things. Publishers such as News Corp are already using the service and it’s making headlines around the world. We’ve got clients such as Coles, Qantas and Bauer on board with our products and we’re helping make ads for brands like Harvey Norman. These are top class names.

We kind of almost forget how far we’ve come.

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