Posted on October 18, 2009 - by Justin Hartman

ad:tech, Adgator and me – it’s the perfect fit

Jeremy Schoemaker who runs the blog Shoemoney is offering one person an all-expenses paid opportunity to attend ad:tech New York in early November. Now I’m not big on entering many competitions but attending ad:tech is something that is critical to me and my business. In addition to attending the ad:tech conference there is also a pass to attend Content Revenue Strategies (formerly Adspace) where Jeremy is going to be speaking and you get to have lunch with the man himself.

So why is this important to me and my business and why do I feel that I should attend over all the other potential candidates? Well there are two main reasons which I’ll highlight below.

Adgator – Africa’s first blog advertising network

Afrigator, the company I co-founded and now the largest niche aggregator in Africa, pioneered the first blog advertising network on the continent called Adgator. We launched Adgator almost a year ago and we’ve had some great response and varying success. In particular, what I’ve noticed is that we’ve solved a critical need to connect advertisers with bloggers (vice-versa) and for the first time there is a simple solution for brands to advertise and communicate to a social media audience in Africa.

While we’ve certainly solved many problems we are the first to market and this has come at a hefty price. There have been huge learning curves for us and as the market isn’t as big as say the U.S. we’ve had to be disruptive in our innovation in order to succeed. For me ad:tech would help us to learn from people a whole lot smarter than us, connect with highly influential people in the market and ultimately give us valuable insight into the state of play.

All of this will help us apply what we’ve learned and the insight we’ve gained to a market that we ultimately understand. I’d imagine that attending this conference would leap-frog our business to a completely new level and this is critical to our survival.

Working with the U.S. Government

Back in August 2009 we were contacted by the U.S. Government and together we formed an interesting partnership. We worked very closely with the Department of State, the SA Embassy as well as America.gov to assist them in showcasing the work the U.S. is doing in Africa.

Together we launched a pioneering social stream in time for Sec. Hillary Clinton’s seven nation trip to Africa and not only did this showcase official content from America.gov but it also showcased the conversation happening in real-time across all the social media platforms. We’ve long built up a relationship with African bloggers and content producers and it’s relatively easy for us to pull all of this together and we aggregated everything from Afrigator (i.e. blog posts), Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and Delicious that related to Sec Clinton’s trip.

As a result of our very close connection with the U.S. I think it’s imperative that I finally get the opportunity to visit the land of the free as I’ve never been to the U.S. before. As America continues its mission in Africa and we continue to work with the U.S. Government it would be hugely beneficial to understand both markets and not just the one we live in.

So, Jeremy, you could possibly chose someone else but I think your best candidate is staring you squarely in the eyes.