Paragone turns 10!

Last week, Paragone celebrated 10 years of helping businesses around the world better manage and optimize their online ads. We’ve come a long way from our earliest days. We’ve established partnerships with six major networks and developed countless unique and cutting-edge features on our platform. Our team has grown from a handful working in Paris to 100+ working in four countries on two continents. The world of digital advertising has also evolved in major ways, and the services Paragone offers along with it.

Here’s a look back at 10 years of innovation and evolution at Paragone.

Starting out in 2009

Paragone was founded by Pierre-François Chiron, a French engineer specialized in Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science. Facebook was already influential at the time, and he saw it becoming even more so in the years to come. Thus, Paragone was founded and began developing and monetizing games for brands on the social network, working with companies like Orange, Oasis, and NRJ.

Shifting to Facebook ads

2011 was a year of major change for Paragone. Pierre-François, along with Pierre-Lou Dominjon (who, until then, was Product Owner at Paragone), decided to shift the company towards Facebook ads, becoming an Official Facebook Partner. Facebook ads were becoming big business, and mobile usage was increasing exponentially. Pierre-François and Pierre-Lou became associates, and started developing the beginning of the Paragone platform we know today.

After 12 months of research and development, the Paragone platform launched, adding value to Facebook’s native tool. After only a few months, Paragone was badged as a Facebook Preferred Marketing Developer for advertising. Within 6 months, hundreds of thousands of advertising dollars had run through Paragone, reaching several million in just 12 months.

Expanding across social

If Facebook was the first major player in social ads, other networks were catching up. In 2014, Paragone integrated Twitter onto the platform, becoming a badged partner—one of the very first companies to be both a badged Facebook and Twitter partner.

One year later, Paragone also became an Instagram partner, and then expanded its reach across social by becoming a Snapchat partner in 2017. Integrating multiple networks onto the Paragone platform has enabled us to add even more value to each one for our clients, while also providing global, cross-network performance insights.

Becoming part of Perion

In 2015, Perion Network LTD (a Nasdaq listed company) acquired Paragone. This was part of their vision to acquire different companies all over the world in order to build an offer that covered the whole ads sector, from ad network exchange to social ads. Being part of the Perion Network has provided Paragone with the resources to grow quickly and continue to provide our clients with innovative technology and tailor-made advertising solutions.

Expanding beyond just social

2018 marked an exciting turning point for Paragone as we became a Google Premier Partner. Adding Google to the Paragone offer meant helping clients reach their customers across the entire customer journey as they zig-zag from one network to another. Integrating Google onto the platform has helped provide clients with a coherent, 3D vision of their online ads by giving them the power to see social and search together in one place.

To further expand our offer, Paragone also became a Pinterest Partner in 2019.

Building our Digital Marketing Smart Suite

Throughout these past 10 years as a business, Paragone has constantly evolved to meet the needs of our clients, working to provide the kind of cutting-edge technology that will help them take their online advertising to the next level. Today, we’re building our Digital Marketing Smart Suite to help clients plan, deliver, and optimize cross-network campaigns to match the way consumers behave online.

A major step in the creation of our Smart Suite was Perion’s acquisition of the AI startup Captain Growth in 2019. That algorithm has since been integrated onto the Paragone platform as a cross-network AI module that identifies opportunities for actionable growth. With AI recommendations, clients can get specific suggestions that they can apply directly to their campaigns in just a few clicks, helping them instantly get more out of their online ad spend.

We’ve also developed a comprehensive new tool to simplify media planning, making collaboration between stakeholders and delivering on transparency easier than ever. Our tool offers a central place for everyone to collaborate on online ads, from the planning stage through campaign execution. The Paragone Media Planning module lets clients create cross-channel media plans in an intuitive calendar view, where they can easily compare forecasted KPIs with actual campaign performance, and make adjustments to the plan in real time.

Instead of pitting channels against each other and making them rivals for online ad spend, our Smart Suite helps modern marketers understand their customers’ behaviors across the digital landscape to better plan for future investment and meaningfully measure outcomes.

Our solution is uniquely positioned to act as the centerpiece, reinvigorating the way brands and agencies collaborate to provide a new level of insight, transparency, performance and control.

Here’s a preview of what our Smart Suite can do:

Here at Paragone, we’re looking forward our next 10 years of innovation!