The business of shaking up business

SANDPOINT — AirBnB. Spotify. Uber.

Each has taken their industry and changed the way it is viewed and how business is done.

Add Charles Manning, chief executive officer of Kochava, a Sandpoint-based company that provides attribution, analytics and optimization to mobile advertisers, to that list.

Manning, along with AirBnB, Spotify, Uber, Airship, and 3 Sided Cube, was nominated for Effective Mobile Marketing Series’ “Disruptor of the Decade” Award. The award is one of three the public is being asked for their say in determining who has changed their industry the most.

“It’s a huge honor and it really is for us about our method of operating, which is very focused on innovation and always has been, said Kimberly Manning, senior director of brand at Kochava, noting that her husband, Charles Manning, is the only individual nominated for the award.

“There’s a whole list of awards, but only three disruptor awards are open to the public for votes,” she said. “While the chance of us having Sandpoint really influence it are low, I think it could make a difference. I think it would be really fun [for everyone to be a part of the voting).”

The deadline to vote is 4 p.m. Thursday (midnight UK time). To cast your vote, go online to https://bit.ly/2mLE2FV.

The concept of disruption was coined to recognize how some companies and individuals have created such an innovative way of doing business that it completely changes the way business happens. The award is a way to honor those individuals and companies.

Uber and AirBnB are two well-known examples. Uber has changed the way people get about in many cities and AirBnB has transformed the way people rent rooms when they travel. In the mobile advertising industry, the change-maker has been Charles Manning and the team and Kochava.

“I think that in the mobile advertising industry, we’ve introduced a lot of different technologies that have been disruptive to the status quo and we tend to look at that bigger picture,” Kimberly Manning said.

Because mobile advertising analytics is a technical subject, the “last click” model can be open to a lot of fraud. What Kochava has introduced a series of fraud tools, including the Kochava traffic index, which analyzes networks for fraudulent traffic and makes that a public report for everybody — advertisers and networks and the advertisers alike. The end result is more relevant data for advertisers.

Another effort pioneered by Kochava is creation of a blockchain solution for digital advertising that tackles what had been a lack of transparency in the system.

“There’s so much technology behind [digital advertising] that a lot of people don’t really understand what is going on, so creates the opportunity for fraud to be hidden very easily,” Manning said.

For example, you may have paid for an ad for your beverage to appear during halftime at the Super Bowl on various digital channels. However, it can be hard for that advertiser to know whether they actually got what they paid for or if the contract was fulfiled.

What Charles Manning and Kochava have done is pioneer a blockchain solution that addressed those issues.

“That’s a very disruptive technology, potentially,” Kimberly Manning said. “It’s not released yet but it’s been a very interesting project to work on. There’s some things like that that I think really qualify us for disruption not as obvious to the end user as like an Uber and how it disrupts. You can see that very easily, because if you go to San Francisco and you need to get a ride somewhere, a lot of people have touched that technology whereas we tend to be, we’re more business to business as opposed to business to consumer. Consumers aren’t necessarily going to be seeing any of that but in terms of our industry with advertising over connected devices, there’s a lot of disruptive technology that we’ve built.”

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Caroline Lobsinger can be reached by email at clobsinger@bonnercountydailybee.com and follow her on Twitter @CarolDailyBee.