Business: Bidtellect is a performance-driven, demand-side advertising platform specializing in context-first optimization, cookieless solutions, and quality programmatic.
Founded: 2014
HQ: Delray Beach
Employees: 78
Website: Bidtellect.com
The pandemic has fundamentally changed the way consumers interact with content. In particular, the shift from analog to digital content has been accelerated. This has major impacts on advertisers, whose goal remains clear: share their message with the right audience in the most efficient, most effective way possible.
Delray Beach-based Bidtellect is paving the way when it comes to cookieless advertising. They have built platform context-driven technology and optimization down to the placement level, ensuring readiness for our cookieless future while achieving performance goals.
“We pride ourselves on having built our system based on context and based on behavior – not the individual person,” Bidtellect’s CTO, Michael Conway, told South Florida Tech Hub. “We don’t collect any personal identifiable information.”
“We put users in different types of audiences based on the sites they’ve visited, and categorize them based on the industry standards,” Conway continued.
We’re living through a major reckoning in the advertising industry, explained Conway. The cookieless infrastructure on which Bidtellect is built will go a long way to ensure it remains a major player in the industry, despite the constant change in the space.
The technical prowess of Bidtellect cannot be understated. Their system handles five million decisions a second to serve the eight billion requests it receives each day. Conway measures their data in petabytes (for context: there are 1,024 terabytes in a single petabyte). All this happens within the milliseconds it takes for a website to load.
Michael Conway
Bidtellect has recently begun to focus on the digital television space. “There was always a move toward connected TV, but the pandemic really accelerated that trend,” said Conway. In response, Bidtellect is creating tools to place targeted ads to consumers based on their behavior. “Everyone cutting the cord has become such a growth area for AdTech,” he noted.
Few technologists can boast about having as broad and deep a set of experiences as Conway. In the late 1980s, he was a programmer at NASA, working on small satellite systems and technology in support of deep space travel. He then started working on tech to map the human genome, before stints developing E-ZPass and SunPass systems and even helping the EU supercharge their interoperability. In 2011, he landed in the ad industry, which eventually brought him to Bidtellect.
Conway sits on South Florida Tech Hub’s Board of Directors and also heads the organization’s Higher Education subcommittee. He is bullish on our mission of promoting South Florida as an internationally recognized tech hub.
He asserted that we have reached a certain tipping point in the maturity of our tech ecosystem, now that so many major players have decided to relocate to our region. “I think we’ve already made South Florida a tech hub. Now our job is to help that hub grow.”
Education is an important challenge our region is confronting, according to Conway. “The need for talent has become abundantly clear,” he said, underscoring the positive efforts of local universities to create a strong talent pipeline.
Learn more about Tech Hub’s Talent subcommittees. They’re a huge part of our work to develop South Florida’s tech hub.