Get your commerce on

By Henry Jones

With Web 2.0 as the next California gold rush, advertisers have been struggling for ways to milk its potential. Of all the crazy ideas intended to facilitate efficient, user-specific advertising (Gmail reads your email, Facebook shares what you buy), Benicia-based startup Pure Verticals probably has the craziest. Its solution, via a proprietary platform called Mugzy, is to provide users with a cut of the action.

Imagine a mix of the user-made videos of YouTube, the networking capabilities of Facebook, and the in-your-face branding of NASCAR—all of which can be integrated into virtually any information-sharing website as a widget. You have your network of friends with whom you share video and text like anywhere else—but with Mugzy, you can embed advertisements or purchasing information related to any products that appear or are mentioned. Say you have a super-cool video of you skiing in Tahoe. Why not slap an ad on it to let your friends know more about the North Face jacket you’re wearing? And if any of them happen to click on the ad and buy that product, you get a cut of the profit (at a rate determined by the retailer and the host site).

The technology for Mugzy is ready, and Pure Verticals is currently making the rounds, soliciting investors to support a full-scale launch. Given the profit potential of this kind of online advertising—leveraging P2P (peer-to-peer) exchanges with B2P (business-to-person) while simulta­neously promoting WOMM (word-of-mouth marketing) via UGC (user-generated content)—Mugzy is the kind of acronym-heavy brain­storm that makes online marketers rejoice.

But are we truly ready to inject such overt commerce into our personal exchanges? “Ah, but we do it all the time,” counters Jason Siegel, the supportive younger brother of Pure Verticals cofounder Theresa Klinger, whom I met at the recent launch party for Mugzy. He points out the Armani logo on my glasses. “You’re advertising right now. Why not get paid for it?” pureverticals.com