Tailgate wins Innovation of the Year Award

The London-based  interactive transactional marketing company was recognised for tis advertising technology, which is expected to have a disruptive effect on the online advertising and e-commerce industries by closing the gap between advertising and sales.

"Tailgate Technologies has the ability to change the way online advertising will evolve in the coming years,” notes Frost & Sullivan Research Analyst Zachariah Thomas. “Transactional advertising will boost online sales by capitalising on the technology’s ability to facilitate impulse purchases, without re-directing the customer to another e-commerce site.”

The technology gives customers more direct interaction with the advertiser, while allowing a secure means of commercial transaction within a single display unit.

This is accomplished by treating advertising as an application, which encompasses the entire e-commerce value chain into a single unit.

“Tailgate  technology provides a means for advertisers to close the gap between marketing and sales and enables everything within a single point of contact with the customer,” states Thomas. “Once a potential customer sees the ad, they can make an impulse purchase depending on the product advertised (or purchase a movie ticket while viewing a trailer or a movie clip) by providing the appropriate information.”

By letting users do everything on one site, the advertising campaign can hope for a higher return on investment while reducing the cost it takes to acquire a customer. This form of advertising is also good from the perspective of the site owner, who can retain the visitor for longer.  

“By using existing technologies such as Flash and Ajax, Tailgate™ provides users with information about a product or service and also allows users to interact with the advertiser for a purchase without going to another website,” remarks Thomas. “The transactional unit is a self contained application, which looks like a traditional Internet advertising banner, video, or widget but has the ability to perform secure financial transactions using payment gateways.”

Tailgate, a patent pending technology, utilises standard Internet application platforms such as Flash or Ajax to create a presentation layer for the advertising content and proprietary techniques to communicate with the advertiser’s electronic commerce database as well as with the trusted payment gateway in use.

The units provide 256 bit security for each transaction and ensure the user’s security and privacy by deleting all details after 90 seconds.

Additionally, Verisign secures the secure socket layer connection from the units to the main e-commerce Web server and payment gateway used.