The MIVA Vision

The world of advertising and marketing is undergoing a radical metamorphosis, and MIVA is at the forefront of this paradigm change. To understand why we are in this leadership position, you must step back in time. Several business legends including Lord Leverhulme, the British soap pioneer, Frank Woolworth, America's first discount-retailer and John Wanamaker, the father of the department store, all, at one point or another, complained they knew half of their advertising budget was wasted, but didn't know which half.

Why is it that marketers cannot accurately identify this waste? Traditional media - television, radio, outdoor and others - typically charge advertisers on a cost-per-thousand basis (CPM). These same media do not have an exact methodology to measure the success or failure of an advertising campaign, i.e., return on investment (ROI). We do, and have had for years. In our industry, FindWhat.com and GoTo were the first to realize and act upon this void by launching Pay-Per-Click ads in the late 1990s, where advertisers paid when ads performed.

With MIVA's intense focus on performance and ROI, if Leverhulme, Woolworth or Wanamaker were here today, their complaint about wasted advertising budgets would be reduced dramatically, especially if they advertised with MIVA.

MIVA has continued to evolve as we have aggregated and developed new products and services to better serve our customers. Today we offer a range of products and services through our three industry-facing divisions - MIVA Media, MIVA Small Business and MIVA Direct - aimed at significantly enhancing an advertiser's ability to improve ROI, further minimizing waste and uncertainty.

We were first-to-market with a revolutionary Pay-Per-Call offering - connecting businesses with or without a web presence, with targeted Internet-based leads. MIVA was the first to offer private label solutions to large publishing partners looking to offer a performance advertising solution under their own brand.

Every element of MIVA's business works in unison to reshape modern-day advertising. Within our MIVA Media Division, our cost-effective and powerful advertiser solutions - such as Pay-Per-Click and Pay-Per-Call - deliver qualified leads to advertisers' websites and help them maximize their return on investment. MIVA advertisers pay only when we deliver a lead to them and, as a result, advertisers see exactly where each advertising dollar is spent.

We also help our publisher clients grow their revenue by fully monetizing their website real estate with customized products such as web search, Pay-Per-Click, Pay-Per-Call, private label toolbars and expandable banners.

With MIVA Small Business, we help businesses grow online with integrated marketing and business solutions including a suite of tools to develop, maintain and grow a thriving online business.

MIVA connects millions of targeted buyers with targeted sellers at exactly the right time every day over a global network of partners. MIVA's vision is to allow advertisers to gain complete visibility into the sales cycle and to provide the tools and intelligence to further increase performance and reduce waste.

Today, MIVA enables marketers to measure conversions through a sophisticated conversion-management tool called AdAnalyzerTM. For tomorrow, we are developing tools that will enable marketers to observe customer decision-making as they navigate through cyberspace. For example, in the future, businesses using the MIVA Merchant e-commerce platform will be able to track customers' multiple purchasing decisions as they convert from searchers to shoppers, and finally to buyers.

Our performance marketing initiatives are to business as is E=mc˛ is to physics, because they fundamentally change how advertisers will buy media. In short, MIVA Performance Marketing helps businesses grow.

Our mission is to enable business to maximize their return on their advertising investment, and to reduce the waste that has plagued advertisers like Leverhulme and Woolworth since modern-day marketing began. We also hope that one day in the not-so-distant future the ROI of a marketing department's budget will be as clear-cut as that of the accounting or IT departments.

Bottom line: MIVA will not rest until marketing waste and uncertainty is reduced to 0 percent.