Innovators

AdRizer Measures Digital Revenue for Its Clients

Steve Flee and Ken Bond co-founded marketing and analytics firm AdRizer.

By Rick Morgan October 16, 2017 Published in the September-October 2017 issue of Sarasota Magazine

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Ken Bond and Steve Flee

Image: Jenn Soos

AdRizer co-founders Steve Flee, 34, and Ken Bond, 30, run a Sarasota-based tech company with 20 employees, $15 million in 2016 revenues and an international client roster. The company is also a finalist in GrowFL’s statewide Companies to Watch contest this October. When they started in 2013, they just wanted extra cash for Jet Skis. “If you asked us three years ago, we never would have thought that we would be where we’re at,” Flee says.

AdRizer takes clients’ content and measures how much revenue that content generates on different media such as Facebook and Google AdWords. Many of their clients are print and digital publishers. For example, newspapers on their own are able to monitor how many readers click on an article. But AdRizer offers a much deeper dive, showing how many readers clicked on advertisements that appeared alongside the post, which can help publishers better determine what content is making money. AdRizer also measures what clients spend promoting their content on each platform, a return on investment metric that is unique to AdRizer, Bond says.

Bond, who’s from Sarasota, met Flee, who moved from Ohio, when they worked for a Sarasota advertising company. They created AdRizer after work—partly to avoid the hot Sarasota summers—sitting at Bond’s kitchen counter. This fall, AdRizer is moving into a 5,000-square-foot space at the BOTA Center in the Rosemary District.

Digital marketing analytics is a fast-growing industry that is always changing, and one of the biggest challenges Bond and Flee faced was drawing young web developers to Sarasota. Fortunately, Bond says, a growing tech industry here and in Tampa Bay has led to strong hires within a 100-mile radius. AdRizer now employs five web developers.

The pair, who often scoot around town on electric skateboards, still haven’t bought the Jet Skis. “We just haven’t had the time,” Bond says.

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