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Sonobi: Leading the Way in Audience-First Innovations Learn more about the local independent tech company Sonobi and its Chief Executive Officer Michael Connolly By Alexis George
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t was in the early 2000s, while attending college, when Michael Connolly first knew he’d have a career in tech. He could see the world changing from analog to digital right before his eyes, and it made sense as an aspiring entrepreneur to follow the trend. “Growing up in that environment at that time it didn’t make a lot of sense to focus on building a steel manufacturing company but to focus more on building a digital platform business that could take advantage of the way people’s lives were changing and how technology was changing,” Connolly says. Years later in 2010, Connolly acted on his intuition. He had recently returned from Iraq and was working as a flight instructor in the state of Florida. According to Connolly, he was planning to return to Iraq on a contract, but the deal fell through. So, he had a decision to make. “At the time I just decided to strike out on my own so I called up my brother-in-law who was a technologist and software engineer and told him that I had an idea of building a series of online web properties that we could monetize and that if he would help me then I would give him some portion of the revenue in exchange,” says Connolly. “He agreed and we started it, just the two of us.” Called Digital Tech Publishing, their creation was an innovative software company that built online web applications, reaching over 30 million unique visitors per month, and serving 1.5 billion ad impressions per month. Shortly thereafter, Justin Kennedy came on to lead its monetization efforts. Connolly had met Kennedy years before in Army Flight school and now that Kennedy was out of the Army, the pair would have a chance to join forces again. Digital Tech Publishing was acquired in 2012, but Connolly says the concept around how they managed data was the foundation for Sonobi. Together, Connolly and Kennedy were determined to take a chance on starting an advertising technology company and founded Sonobi.
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Today, Sonobi is an independent technology company that provides a fair and equitable media marketplace that connects advertisers directly with publishers. Simply put, it’s a real time exchange of data and media for the open web. Connolly serves as the Chief Executive Officer and Kennedy serves as the Chief Operating Officer. With access to over 150 million people across premium publications on the Sonobi platform, the company creates trusted connections with today’s most valuable audiences. Sonobi also offers the only Programmatic + Push Notification platform with an owned and operated network of 110+ million subscribers. This allows the company to increase clients site traffic while creating another stream of revenue utilizing push notification technology. For this and many more reasons, Sonobi has been an innovator in the AdTech industry over the past 10 years. Some of the company’s most notable accomplishments include being the: ■ ■ ■ ■ ■
First to launch automated yield optimization for small and medium sized publishers in 2012. First to develop consumer side addressable identity framework in 2016 First in programmatic reservation-based buying First to execute a nationwide addressable campaign First to launch header bidding for premium publishers through its proprietary APEX integration
