Atlanta’s Adility has put a standard retail marketing ploy in a technologically enhanced package.

By Allan Maurer
 
We all love getting a good deal. That’s why a handful of Internet companies such as Chicago-based Groupon and DC’s Living Social are scrambling to grab a piece of the potentially lucrative local deal business. Investors see it as a healthy space, too. About a month ago, they valued Groupon at about $1 billion in a $135 million financing. LivingSocial, which has been ramping up the number of cities where it offers its version of local bargains, raised a total of $49 million, all but $10 million of it in the first four months of 2010.

Both Groupon and LivingSocial and some others in the space are following something like a coupon model that requires them to build local sales forces to hit the phones and the street to put together the daily deals they offer. In Atlanta, Adility is taking a different approach.

Founded in 2009 by serial entrepreneur Thomas Cornelius, Adility is reinventing the gift or value card idea for the Internet age. Cornelius says the reason we’re seeing a shift of attention to the local markets is that “The local markets are much bigger than the national market.”

Thomas Cornelius, CEO/Founder, Adility, says the next few years are going to bring new tools to local marketing.

Pop goes the bubble
 
Cornelius is no stranger to Internet companies. A decade ago during the Internet boom years, he founded Addashop, an e-commerce company based in Miami that let anyone create an online store in five minutes. It had 15,000 clients and was rated one of the top ten technology companies until the Internet bubble burst.
 
Adility has a distinct advantage in what it’s doing over firms such as Groupon and LivingSocial, says Cornelius. It doesn’t have to build a sales force in every city where it plans to do business. And it plans to do business everywhere.

Instead of opening local offices from one end of the country to the other, Adility sells a platform that let’s merchants create gift or value cards easily and partners with Web publishers and others to distribute cards with local deals. Cornelius tells us that while 15-employee Adility does have a small business development team, “Most of us are tech guys.”

Adility’s platform makes it easy for a merchant or service provider to create a gift or value card, picking from design and theme templates.  

Helping small businesses
 
From the start, he says, “Adility did not want to compete in the consumer space. Our core focus is on helping small businesses bring more customers through the doors.” But, he says that when there is a shift in market focus, such as toward local now, new tools evolve to harvest that market. That includes Adility’s platform technology, he says. “We’re the provider of that last mile connection to local businesses, so you don’t need local sales reps.”

Rather than branding its deals the way Groupon and LivingSocial do, Adility works with its partners such as Coupons.com and other sites. The idea is to take prepaid gift and value card products and coupons from local businesses and make that “content” available to publishers. The publishers then send out daily emails including the deals, “Which drives traffic back to their site,” says Cornelius.

They also get a cut of the revenue, increase the number of site visitors and learn to know their audience better because they become customers, Cornelius adds.

Adility works with InComm, a company with more than $11 billion in sales, which provides suites of gift cards sold through displays at Targets, grocery stores, Walmart and other outlets.

“It works great for large companies, but we’re the first to break down that barrier for local small businesses with an instant activation process.” That makes it possible for a local restaurant to advertise in Target (through the gift card displays). It even makes it possible for professionals such as lawyers or accountants or medical practices to market their services through value offers.

In the next few years, Cornelius says, “I believe we’ll see incredible applications coming out that will have us rethinking local and we hope to be part of that.”

Ok, we’re ready, how about a good deal on that dual screen laptop we’ve been craving? Or considering the 90 plus degree temperature, maybe just a triple scoop ice cream Sundae…

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