App-Vertising Finds a Buddy
Monday, September 15, 2008
Steve Smith

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Longtime min readers may remember the husband and wife team of Golf.com founders Mike Lazerow and Kass Savarese Lazerow. Mike had founded college news syndication service University Wire (now owned by CBS) and then the two of them created the Golf news and service portal Golf.com (which sold to Time Inc.). Always on the lookout for the next big serial entrepreneur opportunity, the Lazerows have been working on a social media ad project, Buddy Media , which creates and tracks widgets and other branded social apps. Last week the company launched the BuddyBrain console, which serves as a kind of nerve center or master control for social apps. Divided into two lobes, one ‘side” of the brain-like tool monitors a publisher or advertiser’s social app in the wild, looking at installation rates, the average time spent with the app and retention rates. The other “lobe” uncovers reviews of the apps and product updates. Buddy Media already counts among its clients FedEx, Time, Inc., Priceline and Reebok.

Buddy Media’s most successful launch so far has been the FedEx “Launch a Package” app, which shot to the top of the Facebook app charts in May, with 100,000 installations in 48 hours. The app lets users send material to one another using the famous FedEx branding. Another Reader’s Digest “Prop My Photo” app leverages that brand’s franchise in user-submitted images.

From its current client base, the BuddyBrain compiled stats on 10 social apps to offer a baseline of social app performance. Each app averaged 140,000 installs. Users spent about 2 minutes and 35 second with each app and 85% of them returned to reuse. Buddy Brain claims that the basic metrics of these social apps are 75 times greater than time spent interacting with a typical banner and five times longer than time spent with most TV commercials. Details and screenshots about the BuddyBrain can be found here.

The company is approaching profitability only a year after its launch. The 25-person startup enjoyed a series B round of funding ($6.5 million) led by Softbank Capital.

If you have breaking news to share please contact Steve Smith at ssmith@accessintel.com

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