Mr. Magazine

What if there were a platform that lets you buy an advertising page in a magazine as easily as buying an airline ticket? Well, there is an answer in one word: Spacely.

You will ask, what is Spacely? In the words of its founder and CEO, David Coker,“Spacely is a two-sided market for offline media. It was born from the idea that it should not be any more difficult to buy a page in a magazine or even a billboard ad than buying an airline ticket.”

David shared the idea of Spacely with me almost a year ago and I fell in love with the idea that someone planned to create a digital platform to help magazines and billboards find, access, and place advertising pages in the magazines and on the billboards.  I loved the platform so much that when David asked me to join the advisory board of Spacely I did not hesitate to say yes.

Spacely is still in its infancy but has grown in a way that even surprised its founder. “We thought we’d launch with 20 or 30 publications and grow it from there,” David told me in a recent interview,  “but now we’re at over 600 media partners in more than 40 countries.”

I took the opportunity to chat with David and his COO, Beth Mach, to learn more about Spacely and provide my audience with an in-depth look at a platform that is created to help them sustain their business in these difficult times.

So, please enjoy my interview with David Coker, Founder and CEO, and Beth Mach, COO, of Spacely.  But first the soundbites:

On what is Spacely: “Spacely is a two-sided market for offline media. It was born from the idea that it should not be any more difficult to buy a page in a magazine or even a billboard ad than buying an airline ticket.”

On why creating a platform to help print in a digital age: “We could see that the print industry was an underserved market. A lot of innovation was happening on the digital side.”

On the ease to use Spacely: “The platform is built is also very intuitive and familiar in the way that somebody would buy toothpaste or clothes or an airline ticket.”

On how Spacely works: “As Spacely is a tool for print and out-of-home, there are different mechanisms for making this possible for both. The ultimate goal is to make it transactable to the extent that it can be.”

On the early reaction to Spacely: “Early reaction is a lot of excitement. People are very excited for the opportunity to have their content discovered — easily discovered — and to be able to connect directly with media buyers.”

On the most important factor in Spacely’s platform: “We know that this industry is built on relationships, and this is truly to help encourage deeper, more valuable relationships.”

On the goals of Spacely: “We would be remiss if we didn’t say that Spacely helps everybody achieve a positive upside, whether it’s efficiency or sales, as well as create a really positive environment between both the seller and the buyer.”

On challenges facing Spacely: “Our challenge is how much do we get done in a short period of time to be truly viable and to be the product we envision for our customers and for our clients and users.”

On the role they envision Spacely plays: “Spacely certainly gives us an opportunity to play a role in the positive growth and resurgence of the print environment and print industry.”

On whether Spacely is selling content or space?: “Honestly, Spacely is not selling anything. We’re helping your sales team to do the selling. And sometimes there are advertisers who want as much space as they can get, and sometimes there are advertisers who want to be next to certain content.”

On how is Spacely different than other platforms: “Digital has become easy to buy, even programmatically bought in many cases. We’re careful to point out that Spacely is not programmatic, but our platform lends itself very nicely to other offline media.”

And now for the lightly edited interview with David Coker, founder and CEO, and Beth Mach, COO of Spacely:

Samir Husni: Tell me, what is Spacely?

David Coker: That’s the best question to start off with. Spacely is a two-sided market for offline media. It was born from the idea that it should not be any more difficult to buy a page in a magazine or even a billboard ad than buying an airline ticket.

Samir Husni: We live in a digital age. Why are you trying to help print?

David Coker: Number one, we believe in the value of print media, and beyond that, we believe in the value of the talents of print journalists and the necessity to continue to sell local and personal stories in print media.

We could see that the print industry was an underserved market. A lot of innovation was happening on the digital side. There are hundreds of DSPs and SSPs, and different tools for selling digital media. But those tools really had not been created yet for helping print media to be able to be sold as easily as digital media is to be sold and bought. So, it appeared to be a white space.

Candidly, I thought this was already being done. I thought, Surely this has been done, it’s been tried, and someone else is perfecting it right now. When I was at the BBC, I went to Beth and said, “Hey, does this thing exist already?”

Beth Mach: I was like, “Nope, it doesn’t. And it needs to.”

I will say, too, that bringing digital to both print and out-of-home — but in this discussion today for print — this is how people buy everything online. There shouldn’t be any reason why you couldn’t also in our industry buy these two channels online. It’s very familiar.

And the way the platform is built is also very intuitive and familiar in the way that somebody would buy toothpaste or clothes or an airline ticket, like David said.

Samir Husni: Can you briefly explain how it works?

David Coker: As Spacely is a tool for print and out-of-home, there are different mechanisms for making this possible for both. The ultimate goal is to make it transactable to the extent that it can be.

We connect directly into a publisher’s layout via proprietary technology, pulling through the issue architecture, so partners are able to see what positions are available, what positions are taken, and what the adjacent content is. So, if an advertiser wants to be next to an article on a summer concert series, or if they want to specifically find people who are writing about Harry Styles or Rihanna, they would simply search for that content on our platform and see what is upcoming. 

It is not historically, “Who does typically write about pop culture,” “Who does typically write about female fashion,” but, “Who is going to be writing about New York Fashion Week in the winter,” “Who is going to be writing about a new art exhibit opening in May,” “Who is going to be writing about Harry Styles’ new album,” and knowing where that content is going to be within the magazine and being able to advertise within the proximity to it that they want to be.

Samir Husni: So, you’re working with the publishers and the advertisers?

David Coker: Yes. As a two-sided market, we’ve actively over the past year or so been recruiting partners on both the supply and the demand side.

On the demand side, we’re fortunate to have a number of early partners who we’re already working with and transacting with as the site continues to move through our launch phase.

On the supply side, we thought we’d launch with 20 or 30 publications and grow it from there. But now we’re at over 600 media partners in more than 40 countries. Some of these are really well-known titles like Nat Geo, Fortune magazine, Rolling Stone, and other major national titles.

But then, a lot of them are regional, local, and niche titles like San Diego Magazine, Hour Detroit, Cherry Bombe, and all the Edible titles. We’ve been fortunate to have had a ton of traction with our partners.

Samir Husni: How is the reception from the publishers? Are they happy with what they are getting? What’s the early reaction?

David Coker: Early reaction is a lot of excitement. People are very excited for the opportunity to have their content discovered — easily discovered — and to be able to connect directly with media buyers.

Right now, it’s often a challenge to get in front of the right media buyer at the right time. Spacely eliminates a lot of the friction points, allows you to easily be discovered, and allows your sales team to cover more ground than they would have otherwise.

We often say that the Spacely platform makes a team of five perform like a team of 15. What our platform is meant to do is create a virtuous cycle between the publishers and the buyers. So, the more the publishers use the platform, the more valuable it becomes to the buyers, and vice versa.

What our platform cannot do is make a team of zero perform like a team of five. We’re very careful to say that this is not a programmatic solution. This is not something you flip on the switch and flip off your day-to-day relationships.

The platform is meant to give your team more time for the relationships, so they spend less time doing manual work, less time doing data entry, automating the tasks that can be automated, allowing them to do higher-value work, managing relationships, and presenting high-value, high-concept ideas for proposals.

Beth Mach: The big thing that David hit on is about the relationships. We know that this industry is built on those relationships, and this is truly to help encourage deeper, more valuable relationships. And at the end of the day, people want to move a bit faster, and people want to make a little bit more money all while feeling like they are connected with people they trust.

We would be remiss if we didn’t say that Spacely helps everybody achieve a positive upside, whether it’s efficiency or sales, as well as create a really positive environment between both the seller and the buyer.

Samir Husni: What’s in it for Spacely?

David Coker: A couple things. Obviously, there is a massive financial upside and obtainable market here. Our business model is transactional, kind of like Airbnb. 

There’s a small transaction fee on both sides — the supply side and the demand side — but it’s not an overstatement to say that we certainly have a goal of enabling and creating sustainable business models for local, regional, and niche publications. We think that’s important.

We believe that the erosion of local journalism imperils our overall national discourse, so supporting local journalism — making local journalism a sustainable business model — was very much at the core of our intentions.

Beth Mach: I will also say, we would be remiss, again, if we didn’t mention that we want to build something that helps create an environment of economic stability for the print side, but we’re also not a charity. We do want to make sure we’re creating a positive upside for everyone involved.

Yes, there is an exit plan at some point, but we’ll know what that looks like over the course of time. We’re here to drive positive economic growth for the print industry.

Samir Husni: Are you working with media agencies, ad agencies, or you’re working directly with advertisers?

David Coker: Primarily with the ad agencies. We do have some relationships with advertisers directly. Mostly those have been advisory relationships. We have an advisory relationship with LVMH. We have an advisory relationship with Marriott International, as well as L’Oréal.

Then, we have a handful of other brands that we have friendly relationships with, and they don’t have agencies. So, we’re happy to work with either, but the agencies are really a key part of our overall focus. We want to help the agencies be efficient in their media buys, have transparency in their media buys, and be able to service their clients.

Beth Mach: We also found a new cohort of agencies, meaning digital agencies who don’t have this capability in-house.

There are a lot of advertisers who want the capability of a really smart digital-first agency, but also have print and out-of-home needs, and don’t want to have to go to multiple agencies to be able to do this work.

We’ve found that there’s a bit of a niche of some of the digital agencies coming to us, where they are now with their current business, and with Spacely’s help, have the capability to go in market for existing clients as well as win new business.

Samir Husni: Since the inception of the concept of Spacely and then the actual platform itself, has it been a walk in a rose garden, or have you had some challenges?

David Coker: Like any start-up, there are challenges.

I come from a start-up background, so I’m not unfamiliar with the high highs and the low lows, which is a pretty common story across the founders Beth and I speak with all the time. I tell people, every week is a net positive, and we’re really blessed to have a product that has had such really incredible traction.

I can say in modesty, it’s rare that we hear someone say, “No, this isn’t for us.” It just simply doesn’t happen. Are there things to figure out? Certainly, but almost uniformly, people are excited to use our platform.

People see the promise of Spacely, and we move pretty quickly to an agreement. But candidly, every week is five steps forward and three steps back. We just don’t know from one week to the next what the next challenge is going to be.

Beth Mach: We have a really incredible team, honestly, and that’s been crucial to being able to navigate any challenges.

Every morning, we get together with the leadership team, which I call the Core Four, and our dev team. We debate internally. We debate with the dev team and our business analysts about what should be done, how it should be done. We ask for outside counsel from folks who are in our cohort.

There are challenges. Timing is a challenge. Investment is a challenge. But like David said, we’ve had such a great response. I don’t think we can move fast enough. Our challenge is how much do we get done in a short period of time to be truly viable and to be the product we envision for our customers and for our clients and users.

Samir Husni: What would you consider the major stumbling block, if there is any?

Beth Mach: Money, money, money. Yeah. We’re largely bootstrapped.

David Coker: We’ve been fortunate to raise a nice round among our friends and family, and right now, we’re in the middle of an angel raise, and that’s tricky. A lot of VCs we speak to like us, but we’re too early on in our traction to have a case for VCs to fit their theses.

Almost always, we end up going back to angel investors, who, for us, are former agency leadership, former global publishing house leadership, and people who are within out-of-home currently.

Continuing to raise, finding the right people, finding the right timing, all in the right balance — that’s been a challenge.

I would also say, there’s not just one major stumbling block. It’s a two-sided market. The phrase herding cats gets overused, but what we’ve created is an extremely complicated piece of software. It would not make sense for any one publisher to build it for themselves. It would hardly make sense for one global publishing house to build it for only their titles.

We often compare our platform to Kayak, like the travel booking engine. While it certainly makes sense for Delta Airlines to have its own booking engine on its own site, there’s still need for a third party that sees across the market. We’re that third party that gives macro-market data across the industry, both print and out-of-home.

Our ambitions, let’s say, are grand. Our vision for the product is robust. Getting there, I think our Spacely:Transact product is far more advanced than what we even expected an MVP would be.

We’re very happy with the work. We’re constantly surprised every day at the level of complexity that we can achieve and that we can solve for. That’s quite frankly essential.

Samir Husni: Does it make a difference — working with a large company, large magazine publisher, or an individual local niche magazine?

David Coker: To an extent, it does. I think both have different wants out of Spacely, and we’re able to accommodate both.

A large publisher has existing relationships and they want to maintain those relationships; they want to make the process of working with them efficient, and they want to support their print products.

The local companies, sometimes their print product is their main source of revenue and they want to find incremental revenue. They want to be able to be discovered by Pepsi or Chevrolet, which would normally have a lot of trouble even finding out that they existed, let alone that the content they’re writing is the perfect content for the upcoming Chevrolet campaign. Discoverability is a major factor for the local publishers.

The national publishers, I don’t think they feel like they have to be discovered. To an extent, they do though, because a sales team can only make so many calls and have so much reach, but they don’t feel like that discoverability is a major problem for them. Efficiency is what they are constantly striving for.

Beth, would you say that sounds right?

Beth Mach: Yes, and uniformity.

As David mentioned earlier, our platform gives a team of five the ability to work as a team of 15. You have to have process, you have to have some level of uniformity in the process, but then also in how people are trained.

Using our tool gives them the ability to do that without a ton of training, without a ton of preparation. They can start using Spacely almost immediately.

Samir Husni: So, are you in the business of selling content or filling space?

David Coker: What an interesting way to phrase that question. I would actually say both.

I say that because everybody’s approaching this — each advertiser and each seller is approaching this a little bit differently. If we said we were selling only space, we would be overlooking the benefit of what print brings to a reader.

We would also not be looking at a business in a way that content creates more readership, that it attracts more advertisers, and again, creates that goodwill and the opportunity for us to help stabilize an industry.

Again, I say “help” — it’s not that we’re coming to save the day, but Spacely certainly gives us an opportunity to play a role in the positive growth and resurgence of the print environment and print industry. I would say, the number one bit of feedback we get is, “Why doesn’t this exist already?” We get it from the demand side; we get it from the supply side.

Beth Mach: You asked, “Are we selling content or space?”

Honestly, Spacely is not selling anything. We’re helping your sales team to do the selling. And sometimes there are advertisers who want as much space as they can get, and sometimes there are advertisers who want to be next to certain content.

I think we’re all surprised that a solution that seems as simple and intuitive as what we’re creating has not really existed yet in the way that we’ve built it out.

Samir Husni: Before I ask you my typical personal questions, is there any question that I failed to ask you or anything you would like to add?

David Coker: We touched briefly on out-of-home as part of our business. We often refer to Spacely as the Kayak for offline media — offline being print and out-of-home media. But there are other products on our road map, products that are shown to be necessary by our conversations and discovery with our agency partners — anything that’s necessarily not digital.

Digital has become easy to buy, even programmatically bought in many cases. We’re careful to point out that Spacely is not programmatic, but our platform lends itself very nicely to other offline media, and you’ll see some of that coming to the fore in the not-too-distant future.

One other thing I always like to touch on is this, it’s important to know that while we have products, Spacely is a machine-learning platform. Our system works 24-7, understanding the demand-side patterns and supply-side behavior of our users.

Some of our products include inventory management products, as well as the transaction product, Spacely:Transact itself. But I always consider — and I think Beth would agree — that our number one product is our culture. It’s the culture of our team, and how we work with each other, and how we work with our partners that we’re proudest of.

We really rely on two core values, and those are curiosity and kindness. And valuing disagreement is a key part of our everyday process. So, I always like to call out that who we are as a company is very much a product of wonderful people, and not just the products that we’re creating.

Beth Mach: Well said. Thank you.

Samir Husni: So, Beth, tell me, if I come uninvited one evening to your home, what do I catch you doing? Reading a book, watching TV, cooking?

Beth Mach: My husband is the chef of the house, and I am a great sous-chef. So, a little bit of cooking, but lots of conversation and hanging out with my husband.

We don’t see each other all that much, because we both travel quite a bit. So, an evening of cooking and drinking a nice bottle of wine is always welcome. And we always welcome strangers and friends to our homes for dinner. It’s a lot of fun. It’s kind of a bit of our love language here.

Samir Husni: And David?

David Coker: So, any night of the week, you’ll definitely find me working late.

If you walked in, you’d see me lounging with my cats, playing chess, and answering emails. My wife will have something on the TV. She’s an entertainment writer and editor, so she’ll have two or three different things on various screens and a movie playing on the main TV here.

So, cats, chess, and cranking out correspondence almost with 100% certainty. That’s my routine.

Samir Husni: Beth, what keeps you up at night these days?

Beth Mach: Well, I would actually like to reframe that a little bit. I like to talk about what gets me up in the morning.

I think what energizes me — and we talked about it a little bit — no two days are the same in start-up land, right? You’re faced with something different every day. That is very exciting to me.

And I know this sounds a little Pollyanna, but figuring out how to make the world of advertising exciting and enjoyable, and figuring out ways to create more space and time and deep opportunities to think beyond what’s in front of you — Spacely gives me that opportunity. I just look forward to it.

I’m also part of some other start-ups and roundtables, and getting energy from each one of those and applying it in ways that make the world a little bit more enjoyable is super fun to me.

Samir Husni: And David?

David Coker: Caffeine, full stop. That’s what keeps me up at night.

Samir Husni: Thank you.