Pontiflex Launches Self-Serve Version Of Its “Mobile Signup” Ads

Pontiflex, a company focused on what it calls “mobile signup” ads, is reaching out to smaller advertisers today with the launch of AdLeads, its self-serve platform.

Co-founder and CEO Zephrin Lasker says this has always been one of his goals for the company, ever since it launched five years ago — to allow any business, regardless of size, to pay for marketing leads collected via Pontiflex ads (advertisers only pay when someone actually enters their contact information into a sign-up form). With the growing importance of mobile, Lasker says this is “the next big step” beyond Google AdWords for many small businesses.

“We’re on our phones all the time,” he says. “They might as well be taped to our foreheads. Anybody from a small business owner to a media planner can tell that everybody’s attention has shifted.”

Lasker also walked me through the process of creating and managing a campaign in Pontiflex. The whole process of creating an ad, creating the form, and targeting ads based on geography and topic only took a few minutes, then you can track the performance of the ads in real-time. Behind the scenes, he says Pontiflex has developed its own set of algorithms for targeting the audience that will be the most responsive to an ad. The minimum campaign size is $100, and you can currently place self-serve ads in nine countries.

More than 300 businesses participated in the AdLeads beta test. Pontiflex is planning an ad campaign to promote the new platform, with some “secret” promotional efforts in the works, but Lasker says he’s hoping the biggest growth will come from word-of-mouth.