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Cree Lawson, Founder & CEO of Travel Ad Network: He's Pitched His Tent and Cornered a Market
The origin of Cree Lawson’s success thus far begins with his parents’ love of camping. “My parents were both professors at a junior college,” he said. “Every year when school ended, they packed us up and we’d spend the summer tent camping. I lived for that
vacation.” The family, which lived outside Nashville, traveled all over the country. The wanderlust lifestyle stuck.
Fast forward two decades and you will find Lawson oddly in a much different setting in his new offices at New York’s famed tech start-up building, 55 Broad Street. It should not be hard to recognize him. He is one of the few men smiling in lower Manhattan. As founder and CEO of Travel Ad Network (TAN) he is the rare boss handing out the employee handbook to new hires, instead of pink slips to departing staff.
What is the company secret? Lawson identified a lucrative niche for online advertising which also spoke to his passion. He fused it with his love and knowledge of emerging technology and has built a successful online travel advertising agency, or OTA, as they say in the business.
Lawson first saw the promise of the Web as an editor at his college newspaper at Belmont College in Nashville. In 1995 he posted the paper online, thinking like an editor, not publisher, and omitting the advertising, a fact which seems to still haunt him. After graduating he wrote for the Nashville Banner and then moved to New York to pursue a Master’s degree at New York University.
Only a few years post the development of the graphical user interface, the reality of commerce on the World Wide Web had just come to fruition. New York’s “Silicon Alley” was rising and NYU’s downtown campus was smack in the middle of all the brouhaha. Lawson took advantage of the situation working in the new media divisions at a series of publishing houses, including Random House, Foder’s Travel Guides, the Associate Press and Time Warner. To round out his media education, he later worked at two failed e-publishing start-ups.
“It occurred to me in graduate school that the Web is the most effective medium we’ve seen at collapsing boundaries,” Lawson said. “What section of industry could make better use of that then travel? There had been fundamental shift in modern economics and also a revolution in media brought in by the Internet. It demolished the price of distribution.”
After finishing his degree he joined the travel guide publisher Rough Guides Inc., selling joint ad campaigns across Roughguides.com and then sister site Igougo.com, giving him the experience and confidence he needed to start Travel Ad Network two years later.
The goal was to aggregate travel web sites and then sell the ad space across the network. Part advertising space rep, part media planning firm, TAN requires travel sites to sign an exclusive deal letting them rep the ad space on the sites. In turn, it sells space to advertisers such as Hilton, United Airlines, T-Mobile, which want to get their brand in front of the affluent travel population. It creates a media plan for them based on specific demographics and places the ads throughout the TAN network.
At launch, it was a chicken and egg proposition with Lawson competing against some much larger, and well-funded, concerns. Alas, today TAN works with over 200 travel web sites worldwide, reaching 25 million unique users. Clients include LonelyPlanet, Rand McNally, Maps.com, CheapFlights, RoughGuides.com, BootsnAll, WAYN.com and CheapOair.com.
It was not an easy endeavor. When Lawson launched the company in 2003, his first hire was his younger brother. But he did not stay long. “He decided to finish his college education,” Lawson said. “Which was probably a good idea.” A true “sole” proprietor, Lawson drove the business by himself racking up revenue of $30,000 per month before meeting up with the guy who would take TAN to the next level.
Enter Bob Sacco. Sacco is a first generation digital ad salesperson, having left copywriting behind in 1996 to join CyberGold.com. From there he was recruited to head the sales effort for the San Francisco Chronicle’s SFGate.com. Following the sale of the Chronicle, he moved to Knight Ridder Digital, heading national sales for its Real Cities Networks. At TAN he boosted sales from the $30,000 a month to $300,000, earning him the moniker of “Cofounder.”
Lawson continues to build-out his executive staff and hire salespeople, but he says the biggest challenge---even in this economy with many potential candidates to choose from-- is to find qualified sales people. “A lot of people selling online ads early on left the field entirely after the bust,” he said. “We find people who have sold for traditional media have trouble making the change.
Sacco has moved to Vice President of Marketing and the sales team is now run by Scott Cherkin, who got his introduction to the world of digital ad sales in its early days, working for the then famous, now infamous, TheGlobe.com. [For those readers who came of age after the dot.com bust, TheGlobe.com was one of the first social networking sites. When it went public in 1998 it set a record for first day gain of any IPO in history up to that date. It later floundered and suffered the fate of many of the early, pre- ubiquitous broadband, pre-public wireless access, companies which had novel ideas for Web businesses, many being replicated and heralded as pioneers now.]
In April 2008, five after launching, TAN raised its first round of venture capital totally $15 million and coming from a roster of blue-chip venture firms including Rho Ventures, Village Ventures and individual investors. The bootstrapped company could sustain its growth through sales and limited private investment, but Lawson made the decision to raise the venture money to stave off any competition. “We built the largest advertising network in the travel media marketplace, focusing on creating as much value as we could,” he said. “Since we’ve proven it works, we saw an opportunity for a competitor—with larger resources-- to enter the marketplace.”
What’s more, the funds, and instant respect and publicity that comes with it, puts TAN in good stead to continue to grow the company, mitigate the downturn and position itself for a lucrative exit.
On that point, Lawson is thinking big. He is young enough to see his company through, but old enough to remember the pre-dot.com meltdown of the late 1990’s. He knows he could have sold his company by now and be travelling the world, no tent necessary, but is not afraid to mention—even as the Feds are bailing out banks-- the phrase: IPO.
In the meantime, Lawson will forge ahead signing up travel web site publishers. “There are 10,623 web sites dedicated to travel, according to Hitwise,” he said. “That’s 10,402 to go.”
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