Why this former exec ditched Facebook to drag ad agencies into the 21st century
Again and again, he noticed that the way they schlepped their varied ad materials - in overflowing folders, or via PDFs attached to emails sent months before - seemed unnecessarily messy.
"We'd be going to these giant brands and they'd have these foam-core poster boards with printed out marketing campaigns stuck to them lining their walls" Gomersall told Business Insider, "It seemed so archaic."
Worse, ad teams seemed to struggle to keep track of the different iterations of their campaigns across different digital channels like Facebook or Instagram (or Tumblr, TV, or banner ads, or whatever else.)
He used to joke with execs who delegated their Instagram account duties to the summer intern, prodding them:"Did you know that, guaranteed, 750,000 people are going to see that in 48 hours in your demographic?"
As new platforms like Snapchat and Pinterest spring up, with each requiring their own unique ad execution, advertisers want an easy way to understand how their message is translating across all of them.
So, while still at Facebook, Gomersall's gears started turning with ideas about a better way to help marketers better keep track of all their creative work, budgets, and timelines.
In January 2014, Atomized was born.
It's a content calendar management software that lets brands and creative agencies keep track of all their information in an executive dashboard. Although many marketers already rely on cloud marketing services made by Oracle, Adobe, or or Salesforce, Atomized differentiates itself by amping up the visuals and letting teams easily see how their campaigns look on each channel.
Gomersall finally left Facebook in June to focus on the startup full-time.
Here's how Atomized looks in action:
Atomized pairs its pay-per-month software with deals on enormous wall screens through a partnership with the company Cinemassive (both startups are based in Atlanta, Georgia.) That way, marketers can ditch the foam board but still see their campaigns in a larger-the-life format:
Gomersall says it wasn't scary to leave his comfy Facebook job because he already had a proven product before he left: Atomized had technically been up and running for months, reeling in new customers regularly.
Today, when he visits the West Coast, he will often end up meeting with ad contacts he worked with at Facebook who he remembers griping about their campaign's lack of consistency across different channels. Of course, he now swoops in and pitches them on Atomized.
"I show them the screenshot, and then they get excited," he says.
Atomized has raised $1.5 million in funding to date, according to CrunchBase, and has signed on "multiple top global companies," though declined to get any more specific about its customer stats.