STAQ in the News

STAQ Announces $2mm Funding Round

STAQ, the automated reporting platform as a service for digital advertising, today announced that it has closed a funding round of $2 million. The funding round included every major investor from the company’s most recent raise, a testament to STAQ’s steady growth and opportunity to.... Read More

For Turner, Faster Data Means More Efficient Pricing

Turner’s revenue analytics team wasn’t always quickly able to answer questions like whether the presidential inauguration affected advertising revenue. The publisher couldn’t collate data more than weekly or monthly because it worked with more than a dozen programmatic partners, each with their own user interfaces, which supplied ads across Turner’s multiple sites... Read More

Nexstar and Accuweather Among More Than 20 New STAQ Platform Clients

STAQ, the automated reporting and integrations platform as a service for digital media, today announced partnerships with more than 20 new clients. The list includes Nexstar, Bustle, Shazam, Accuweather & represents a wide variety of digital media and advertising technology... Read More

Do Web Publishers Need Their Own Marketing Cloud?

It seems the more complex the digital media business gets, the more need for software intermediaries. Indeed, not only does Meredith manage multiple websites that each employ a handful of programmatic partners, it is also providing advertisers an ever growing list of complementary data tracked by specialists who measure things like ad viewability and audience measurement... Five-year-old Staq says it can help customers pull in data from 400 different ad tech partners. The firm’s clients include a growing list of big media names likes Hulu and Warner Bros. Read more

With Video, Publishers Have A Chance To Avoid The Mistakes Made In Display?

Facebook recently announced a change in its video-sharing metrics that favors the original creator over distributors or “reshare” pages. Facebook is finally working to help media companies understand their own content better, but its woes with video are hardly over. Facebook's list of metrics, especially for media companies, includes a "retention graph" and detailed breakdowns of autoplay, click-to-play and engagement by time interval. Any publisher that wants to go down a rabbit hole of Facebook video metrics should be able to, even though no other partner, including Google or Snapchat, offers the same metrics... Read more

Unifying Reporting Across All Programmatic Vendors: No Small Task For Publishers

Programmatic yield management can easily become a nightmare for publishers. We’ve all tested dozens of demand sources, including ad networks and exchanges, such as DoubleClick AdExchange (AdX), AOL and Amazon, as well as different ad placements, units and more. While every publisher tries to optimize and maximize revenue, this usually includes the laborious process of recording and carefully monitoring tons of data for revenue, impressions, discrepancies and fill rates by device and geography for each demand source. In addition, programmatic buying uses real-time-bidding (RTB) technology, which changes frequently and requires constant monitoring. Read more

STAQ's New Automated Programmatic Management Platform Adopted by Leading Publishers

NEW YORK, Oct. 14, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- STAQ, the automated digital advertising analytics and operations company, announces a platform for enabling custom automated campaign and inventory management capabilities. The new platform connects major ad servers with any of the 225 integrated programmatic vendors and exchanges under STAQ management. As a result of STAQ's innovative position in the market, they have recently closed partnerships with leading media companies including Meredith Digital, DailyMail.com, Warner Bros. Digital Media Sales, Gawker Media, ShareThis and The Weather Company. Read more

For Publishers, Embracing Programmatic Is Not A Black Or White Decision

Publishers, including Refinery29 and BuzzFeed, represent hot digital content brands that have recently decided to opt out of the real-time bidding (RTB) ecosystem. Some, like BuzzFeed, don’t even sell traditional display advertising, choosing instead to build a business on native content, video and other more engaging options. Yet many other publishers have taken the opposite approach. If you envision digital advertising as a big pyramid, brands, which have the money, sit at the top. As the money gets handed down to agencies, demand-side platforms, exchanges and supply-side platforms, the pyramid widens, with publishers at the bottom. Read more

Ad Tech Firm STAQ Raises $2.5M In Series A Round

STAQ, an ad tech firm that unifies advertisers’ “tech stacks” into one platform, on Monday announced it has closed a $2.5 million Series A round of funding. The round was led by Genacast Ventures and Core Capital. Other investors include Kinetic Ventures, Revel Partners and The Hive, which also provided STAQ's seed round of $1.1 million, per a release. The STAQ platform lets advertisers view their campaigns, analytics and other relevant data across multiple tech partners. The company claims to be integrated with “more than 175 of the most widely used technologies,”... Read more

Death to Spreadsheets: STAQ Unifies Multiple Reports

By Don Willmott, AdExchanger -- The best-of-breed hodgepodge has created a giant puzzle for marketers, who must piece together various vendor reports to see a clear picture of ad campaign performance. “Publishers and marketers rely on third-party reporting to run their businesses,” said James Curran, CEO of STAQ, a systems integrator specializing in advertising technology. “They have multiple log-ins, multiple accounts, and multiple partners. All those UIs and platforms deliver reporting, but the data is siloed, so people go crazy cutting and pasting into complicated spreadsheets to get an overall view.” It’s an inefficient and time-consuming process. STAQ, which has raised $1 million in seed funding from angel investors and California-based investment firm The Hive ... Read more

James Curran of STAQ Talks About Integrating The Ad Technology Bundle

James Curran has spent the last decade working in and building ad platforms. As former product and business development lead for Lotame’s Data Management Platform and a product manager for Advertising.com, James has seen a historical trend in the use of multiple ad platforms by companies and believes it points to where they will be taken in the future. His new company, where he serves as CEO and Co-Founder is called AdStaq, which he believes is the catalyst in making them working together. Read more

AdTech startup STAQ will pay you $20 an hour to learn Ruby in Baltimore

Calling all would-be programmers: if you have between 20 and 40 hours a week to spare for the next three to six months, Mike Subelsky will pay you $20 an hour to learn Ruby programming. But you’ll have to come to Baltimore first, if you’re not already living here. Subelsky is the CTO of Staq, an advertising-tech startup with offices in Hampden that he cofounded just over a year ago. To accommodate STAQ's recent growth, he’s willing to hire several beginning programmers in temporary positions, start training them in Ruby development, and then put them in charge of building the core components of Staq’s technology, which will involve API development and web-scraping... Read more

InvestMaryland semi-finalist STAQ raises $1M seed funding

STAQ, an InvestMaryland Challenge finalist and incubator-grown startup, recently raised $1 million in seed funding from The Hive, a California-based investment firm, the Baltimore Business Journal reported. Staq was founded in 2012 and developed at the Betamore incubator by CEO and co-founder James Curran. In a recent question and answer with MDBIZ News, Curran compared his product to Mint.com, except instead of aggregating all of a user’s bank account and loan information, it collect data from ad and media platforms. Read more