Pioneering Offers and Deals in Social, Mobile and Online media. 

2006 thru to 2007

Wantsa’s founder David Strebinger stumbles across a little Web site called “Facebook”. Instantly David identified the potential of “Social Media” and saw an opportunity to take advantage of a “New Web” he was certain would emerge. Over the next year David would research and learn everything he could about social media, the social graph, applications, viral marketing and what was possible for businesses and advertisers using this new form of viral communications.

The path was clear… David would set out to build a new set of advertising tools and technologies. This new set of tools would take into account social media, new forms of mobile technology, integrating the social graph, and best of all… it would be a results based system that generate the type of results small local businesses wanted out of their marketing campaigns. 

In 2007, David and his newly formed team were building the foundation of what would evolve to become Wantsa. David identified two areas he believed were the most relevant and meaningful areas for having success with local advertisers:

1. People love to get a deal, e.g. “Free Dinner for Two” ; and
2. People go where their friends go, i.e., the recommendations of peoples’ own social community is a huge motivator of consumer engagement with local businesses.

2008

David and his team launched the Wantsa “Recommendation Engine” as a Facebook application. The application was one of the most sophisticated applications that existed on Facebook at the time.

The application worked much like a search engine only when you typed in what you were looking for into the search box, you would get the personal recommendations of your friends along with local directory information.  Learning and growing inside Facebook as an application, the team then began developing the “Deal & Offers Platform”.

The Deal Platform (now Originator Platform) would eventually allow any business or advertiser the ability to create and post targeted deals to interested consumers. David believed this would be the “Monetization of the Future” for social media and mobile media and will eventually evolve to revolutionize the online advertising industry. The team embarked on creating a system that would change the way local businesses connect to local consumers. The mission was to connect businesses to consumers in the most effective manner possible using all forms of technology and communications.

2009 – Wantsa gets formed

Initial tests indicated that Wantsa had created an end-to-end solution capable of engaging mobile and online consumers in taking specific actions that resulted in real people engaging with real businesses in a real & meaningful way. The technology had evolved to a point that:

1. any business could create and post targeted and meaningful offers into the Wantsa Network;
2. those deals and offers could then be published into any environment online or on a mobile phone;
3. when a consumer saw an offer, they could click on and engage with the offer by purchasing, signing up, or giving consumer feedback directly to the business posting the offer;
4. the consumer would receive a personalized certificate that they could take and redeem at the businesses location;
5. when the consumer arrived and presented the certificate back to the advertising merchant, the merchant could access quickly and validate the certificate;
6. once validated, the business could access reports, analytics, statistics and information that showed the full details about where the consumer found the deal, when they purchased or accepted the deal, and any information that the consumer had authorized to be shared with the merchant in exchange for the deal; and
7. The end result was a platform that transforms the online advertising industry into an effective “Pay Per Result” model that, in turn, drives consumers to businesses while giving both “WHAT THEY WANT”.

2010 – 2011

Now that Wantsa has developed the systems and proven out the model, the fun begins…

Knowing and understanding the power of what has been built, David and his team have begun opening up discussions with some of the largest “local market sales forces” throughout North America. The idea was to partner with the largest and most powerful players in the online marketing world and support them with the training and tools of how to generate substantially more revenue from their existing infrastructures.  

Wantsa continues to sign on new partners and demonstrate its products to many of North America’s largest directory companies, mobile publishers, search companies and mapping focused organizations. The industry is evolving rapidly and Wantsa is focused on delivering its solutions to the world’s media market leaders as quickly as possible.

Wantsa is currently plugging in a number of large enterprise level media organizations, and working with their teams to leverage the tools and technologies Wantsa has developed. Scaling the technology, implementing custom features for various partners and creating sales and marketing documents that help to explain the incredible power of the Wantsa tools is what takes up most of the team’s time.

Wantsa has evolved into a customizable white label solution for enterprise level corporations. This means that while you may not see the Wantsa brand or logo on many of our partners’ websites, Wantsa may be powering the technology they use to connect their consumers to advertisers globally.