Ampush wins Facebook PMD Innovation Competition

The competition was designed to encourage PMDs to develop innovative marketing technology that effectively leverages Facebook's news feed.

San Francisco based Ampush, won the competition for its Project YOGA (Your Open Graph Applications).

The competition was designed to encourage PMDs to develop innovative marketing technology that effectively leverages Facebook’s news feed. Entry was open to over 260 preferred marketing developers and the theme was, ‘The Era of News Feed’, and PMDs were tasked with creating a marketing product that effectively leverages the feed as a paid media placement.

Founded in 2009 Ampush is a social technology company helping brands and direct response advertisers achieve performance at scale with Facebook Ads.

"Winning the grand prize in the Facebook PMD Innovation Competitor is an important achievement for Ampush. We've had many important milestones and this is the greatest achievement so far this year," Jesse Pujji, CEO & co-founder at Ampush told Rediff.com.

He said that the YOGA platform facilitates hyper-personalised consumer engagement and generates authentic “voice-of-user” stories through seamless integration with news feed and open graph. Marketers can leverage YOGA’s analytics and ads integration to amplify stories and drive "referred intent,” the idea of channelling the voice and actions of users to achieve marketing objectives. The product is still in alpha-stage development.

Answering on how the company worked on the theme ‘The Era of News Feed’ Pujji said Facebook has realised and recognised that ads in the Facebook News Feed are the most effective. They've also increased the inventory of ads available for this placement. The YOGA product helps marketers better integrate with Facebook's news feed.

Ampush will continue as Facebook’s preferred marketing developer, continuing to help brands and direct response advertisers achieve performance at scale with Facebook Ads.

Apart from grand prize, Facebook also recognised six winning companies. In the press statement Facebook said, "The winners each demonstrated excellence in building technology that bridges marketer needs across the four dimensions of the PMD Programme: pages, ads, apps and insights."

Ampush is a selected group of Facebook Ad API (application programming interface) partners and work with fortune 500 advertisers in the US. The company works as the preferred marketing developer. Pujji and his co-founder Nick Shah both went to The Wharton Business School, said in their previous interview that when you learn and add academics you learn how to analyse business. You learn the numbers and accounting and you read stories about management. "But it's totally a different world when you step into it and it's 100 per cent unstructured and nobody makes the rules. You are responsible for making decision, motivating people hiring new people and going out and making sales. So there is no rulebook and guidelines and that is totally different. In school there is a structured curriculum.

The biggest difference is here you have to write a story by yourself and that’s been the biggest challenge. "We still consider ourselves a lifelong student of entrepreneurship," said Shah.