Who's the Next Google

Founded in 2004, Adknowledge is a digital advertising company headquartered in Kansas City, Missouri, USA. According to the company website, it’s the fourth-largest digital marketplace behind only Google, Facebook and Microsoft’s Bing—and the largest among privately held digital advertising companies. Adknowledge has designed and managed campaigns through social media sites, mobile, apps, email, video and display ads, for leading brands such as Range Rover, LG and L’Oréal. The company also works with publishers to help them monetize their sites and lists. In April 2013, leading industry publication Adotas ranked Adknowledge's email channel as the best in the industry for performance. CNBC once featured Adknowledge in an article entitled "Who's the Next Google?" The Wall Street Journal said, "Adknowledge provides performance, or cost-per-action, advertising for companies looking beyond traditional search engines such as Google and Yahoo."

Adknowledge was founded by Scott Lynn, who led the company as President and CEO until 2012 when then-COO Ben Legg (former COO for European Directories and Google Europe) became CEO. In a 2013 interview, Legg described digital marketing as the new customer research. “Online marketing is all about using consumer data to get an idea of what the consumer wants," Legg said. "You don’t even need to know exactly what they want; you just have to have an idea and then move at the speed of light to test that idea live."Adknowledge made news at 2013's ad:tech San Francisco conference with an invitation-only party on Alcatraz. The company produced a video that documented the evening.In June 2013, Adknowledge made it first-ever trip to the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity where it showcased its AdParlor platform. On June 19, 2013, CEO Ben Legg was a guest on Bloomberg TV's Bloomberg West daily news show. He talked about advertising strategy on Facebook and the ways brands can carefully target ads to users. In August 2013, InsideCounsel magazine named Adknowledge's legal department as one of its 10 Most Innovative in an annual issue, joining 3M and The Hartford, among others on the list.