Forbes: Drummer Turned Tech Entrepreneur Builds Captify To Create Search Data Powered Ad Platform

A series of interviews with creative and marketing innovators changing the business landscape at the 2019 Cannes Lions Creativity Festival: Dominic Joseph, Co-Founder and CEO, Captify.

Bruce Rogers: Tell us about Captify and how it came about?

Dominic Joseph:  I’ll start at the beginning. I was a professional drummer signed to Polydor Universal. I did that for four or five years, touring with quite a few big bands like the Killers, the Bravery and other indie pop bands. Unfortunately my drumming career didn’t work out as planned. The band was unceremoniously dropped from the record label and I ended up a session drummer, which I particularly didn’t enjoy because I really enjoyed the process of building a band, but I was also very frustrated with the fact that when you’re a drummer you’re not in control of your own career because it’s really down to the singer and the songs. So, I ended up in advertising, like most failed drummers (laughs).

Rogers: Why advertising?

Joseph:  When I stopped drumming, I basically didn’t have any qualifications so I was trying to find a job. I applied to a load of record labels and nobody got back to me. I ended up responding to an ad on the internet to do advertising sales at Media Corporation PLC, which is a UK public company that was an advertising sales house representing various national newspapers.

I started there and I ended up running the UK sales team after five years. While I was there I was selling pretty average advertising products, and you could see the rise of Google coming. Google was really the leading force in the growth of digital advertising and remains as the main reason why digital is where it is today. I couldn’t really believe that search data wasn’t being used to power other things and other types of advertising beyond a search ad. So, I was 26 years old at the time when I decided to quit my job, start Captify and put together a product which was search data powering media and naively advanced on the task of building this product and company. Now it is eight years later and it’s still a product that is being heavily invested in and built. It’s an incredible undertaking.

We specialize in bringing search data in from anywhere other than Google and Amazon. We realized that people look for products and transact to buy products all over the Web, all the time. They could be holidays on travel sites or they could be looking for cars on automotive sites. That same notion also applies to retail and finance sites and many different sectors and industries.  We decided to partner with those publishers to provide advertising products based off that search data and built the business from there.

Want to find out more? Continue reading the full article on Forbes.