Former AOL Chair Backs New Search Tech Startup 'Clickable'
NEW YORK-BASED CLICKABLE ANNOUNCED THAT former AOL Chairman and CEO Jonathan Miller has joined the company's Board of Directors. — The announcement comes on the heels of the search tech startup's naming of Nielsen BuzzMetrics vet Max Kalehoff …
Context & Ripple Effects
Clickable has been building toward this all year: back in July 2007 the New York startup launched its self-serve tools for managing search ad campaigns across engines, positioning itself as a simplification layer over Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft paid search. The board announcement lands alongside a fresh $3 million funding round, with former Nielsen BuzzMetrics executive Max Kalehoff joining the team just before Miller was confirmed.
The hire matters because of who Miller is leaving behind: his former employer AOL spent November 2007 buying its way into advertising technology, announcing the Quigo acquisition on November 7 and rolling out Platform-A video ticker ads a day before this news. A former AOL chairman taking a board seat at a search-marketing startup is a vote that value in search advertising is migrating toward the management-tooling layer.
First-order effects
- Clickable gets an experienced large-scale media operator on its board plus $3 million in new capital, strengthening its pitch to advertisers who want cross-engine campaign management without agency overhead.
- Miller's credibility transfers directly: he ran one of the largest online ad businesses of the portal era, so his endorsement signals to advertisers and future investors that Clickable's simplification approach is legitimate.
Second-order effects
- Other early-stage search-marketing toolmakers gain a fundraising template — a marquee ex-portal executive plus a modest round — making it easier for similar startups to raise against Google and Yahoo's own self-serve interfaces.
- Agencies and incumbent ad-technology vendors serving small and mid-sized advertisers face pressure from tools that strip out managed-service fees, forcing them to justify their margin on strategy rather than campaign mechanics.
Third-order effects
- If ex-portal executives keep recycling into the ad-tooling layer, the industry structure tilts toward a middle tier of independent campaign-management platforms sitting between the search engines and advertisers — echoing earlier attempts at independent search relevance plays like LookSmart's push for a vertical comeback.
- The pattern points toward search advertising consolidating around whoever owns the advertiser workflow, raising the long-term question of whether the engines themselves absorb that layer or leave room for independents.
The trend: Portal-era media executives are moving onto boards of search-advertising tool startups, betting that the money in paid search is shifting from running the networks to managing campaigns across them.