Traffic director-Missoula man, friend route Internet advertising from basement with AdOperations Interactive

The dot-com boom is long dead. Long live the dot-com boom.

For Jesse Poppick, the demise of so many online companies – some of them, companies he has worked for – and the cash-strapped plight of the few that remain, has meant a golden opportunity, one which has blossomed into one of Missoula’s most unlikely, yet successful small business startups.

By JOE NICKELL of the Missoulian

After all, who would expect big-name online companies such as Salon.com and Forbes.com to buy critical services from a two-man operation headquartered in a basement in Missoula’s Rattlesnake neighborhood?

"I don’t want to overstate this," says Poppick – who is all too intimately familiar with the hype that fueled and then destroyed the Internet boom – "but really, this seems like the perfect example of the power of the Internet to enable new kinds of relationships."

"This" is AdOperations Interactive, http://www.adopsinc.com a company founded by Poppick and a partner in Miami last summer. The company provides outsourced ad trafficking and campaign management to online companies. In plain English, that means that Poppick takes orders placed for banner and other Web advertisements, and makes sure the orders are fulfilled.

For example, when Salon.com receives an order from American Airlines, Poppick configures the software that places the ad in the appropriate space on Salon’s Web site. Because Salon.com’s Web pages are all generated dynamically – the pages viewed by site visitors are actually assembled on-the-fly by software which combines the ads and site content – Poppick is able to configure the system to show ads only to a certain number of visitors, only on certain pages.

It’s the kind of job that, in the hard-media world of newspapers and magazines, is typically performed in-house, by the same designers who lay out pages. But the opportunities afforded to advertisers and Web companies by online advertising – the ability to tailor ad campaigns not just by the type of publication, but by subsets of site visitor demographics and specific editorial content – bring an added layer of complexity to the execution of ad orders.

Fortunately for the growing list of AdOperations Interactive clients, it’s a type of complexity that Poppick understands well. After all, he used to work for the company that built the software that places the ads into the Web pages.

By the time Poppick graduated from the University of Montana in 1997, with a degree in resource conservation, he was already well-known around Missoula – not as an online ad entrepreneur, but rather as a grass-roots political activist. His first job out of college had him working for Missoula’s New Party, as the organization’s only full-time staffer. While cross-training with Montana People’s Action, he met Elliot Shepherd, a canvasser for the organization. The two eventually married, and moved to New York City, where Jesse took a job with the Nature Conservancy. Living on paupers’ wages was fine for a while, says Poppick – that is, until Elliot got pregnant.

"I realized then that it was time to look for a ‘real’ job," recalls Poppick.

It was early 1998, and the Internet boom was just beginning to reach full rumble. Poppick interviewed with a small company called Real Media, which at the time was building a staff of 12 people in New York City, to sell a software package called Open AdStream. The software made it possible to route and track online banner ads to specified Web pages. Poppick was hired as a "traffic manager" – basically, as a technician who configured Open AdStream for individual clients – despite the fact that, "when Real Media gave me the job, I basically only knew how to surf the Web."

Poppick was apparently a quick study – and it was a good thing, because Real Media exploded in size. The New York City office alone grew from 12 to more than 100 employees in just a few months; other Real Media offices opened across the country and around the world. Soon enough, Poppick had moved from customer service, to selling the Open AdStream software for the company.

"I never had to do a cold call to a client, ever," recalls Poppick. "I was working off of only incoming leads, making more money than I’d ever dreamed of. That was when things were going crazy."

During a vacation to Montana, Poppick stopped off in Livingston, where he was surprised to discover a regional office for Cyber Dialogue – one of Real Media’s primary competitors. Poppick interviewed with the company, and told them he wanted to sell Cyber Dialogue’s software from a home office, ideally in Missoula. He was hired on the spot.

But by the time Poppick, Shepherd, and their 18-month-old daughter, Kaya, moved into their house in the lower Rattlesnake in the summer of 2000, the dot-com bubble had sprung a leak. As once-hyped companies (and major online advertisers) such as Pets.com, WebVan and Boo.com began to go bankrupt, online advertising revenues took a precipitous tumble.

Nine months after moving back to Missoula, Poppick was laid off by Cyber Dialogue. After a month of unemployment, he was rehired by Real Media, and allowed to remain located in Missoula. That, too, didn’t last. When Real Media was acquired by 24/7 Media, in October 2001, Poppick was one of many employees who suffered the axe.

Unemployment couldn’t have come at a worse time. Their daughter, Kaya, had been born with Short Bowel Syndrome; she had almost no small intestine. Unable to absorb vitamins from food, or even digest hard food, Kaya struggled to maintain weight. By age 1, she’d already endured two transplants – her liver, and her bowel – and regular visits to specialists along with daily tube-feeding remained mandatory.

Over the following months, Poppick "shuffled through a bunch of Missoula odd jobs, as you sometimes have to do in order to live here." But turns as a waiter and supermarket clerk couldn’t support the cost of Kaya’s medical care, which often required cross-country trips. During one of those trips, to New York last summer, Poppick heard about a company called TrafficMac, a 1-year-old startup which provided outsourced ad-traffic management to Web media companies. It was a job Poppick knew he could do; he arranged for an interview with the company.

But when Poppick mentioned the interview to Charles Smith, an old friend from the Real Media days, Smith had a surprising message: He told Poppick not to take the job, and to start his own traffic-management company.

"If Charles Smith hadn’t said, ‘You can do this,’ I would never have thought of it," laughs Poppick.

AdOperations Interactive opened its doors last August, not that the opening was a gala affair. It was actually more a matter of turning on the lights and dusting off the desk in Poppick’s basement, where the company is now headquartered. Poppick and former Real Media co-worker Jesse Aguirre, who lives in Miami, are the company’s sole full-time employees. The total startup capital – $5,000 – was supplied by Poppick’s father.

But that five grand has gone a long way already. In addition to Forbes.com and Salon.com, Poppick and Aguirre have sealed contracts with Integrent Media of Chicago, an advertising agency based in Chicago; and E-Healthcare Solutions, an online advertising network specializing in health-related Web media. While Poppick declines to give details of the size of the contracts, he says that together, the four deals are enough to comfortably support himself and Aguirre.

And the potential for the company’s growth seems huge. The sales pitch is straightforward in its appeal to the bottom line of cash-challenged Web media companies: "We can work cheaper than anyone in-house," explains Poppick. "We can say to clients, ‘For less than the cost of one person with salary and payroll, you can hire two of us, in two different time zones; and we can do the exact same job and you don’t have to train us or pay us benefits.’ "

Poppick and Aguiree have also cemented a package of alliances with companies that provide complementary services, such as software tech support, site-user analytics, and even ad creation and sales.

"A small investment, a Web presence, a set of skills, some old references, and that was it," says Poppick. "Being able to leverage those old relationships with former clients from my days at Real Media and Cyber Dialogue – that is the hugest part."

AdOperations Interactive also appears to have jumped into the market at a good time. After spiraling downward for the better part of two years, online advertising revenues rose during the fourth quarter of 2002, and are projected to continue their increase through the rest of the year, according to research by the Interactive Advertising Bureau, a division of the PricewaterhouseCoopers consulting group. As advertising purchases rise, so do the fortunes of companies that serve up those ads, companies like AdOperations Interactive.

"It appears now, after the dot-com hype has lost all credibility, that all the promises are going to come true after all – just a lot slower than most people expected, and nobody’s gonna believe it until they actually see it this time," says Poppick.

Things are looking up for Poppick’s other baby, as well. Last November, the Blue Heron held a benefit concert and auction for Kaya, raising $5,000 to help pay her way into the Encouragement Feeding Program, a project of the University of Virginia which helps children who have suffered from digestive maladies learn to eat on their own.

http://missoulian.com/articles/2003/05/12/business/bus01.txt