Wingman Media and Quillion

Before Prove there was Quillion — the performance and lead-generation operation that ran as the digital arm serving Wongdoody, and where most of what later became Prove’s method was worked out in public, on other people’s budgets.

The work was affiliate partner recruitment, on-demand lead verification and scoring, paid search management, ad serving, web analytics and call-centre integration. The vendor bench tells the story better than a description would: Omniture for analytics, Commission Junction for affiliate, ClickEquations for paid search, TruEffect and Eyeblaster for serving, TARGUSinfo for lead verification, Dialogue Marketing for call handling.

Two things from this period carried forward permanently.

Lead verification as a first-class discipline. When you are paid for leads, you learn very quickly that a large fraction of them are not real, and that the industry’s tolerance for this is a choice rather than a constraint. Verifying at the point of capture rather than reconciling later changed the unit economics of every lead-gen engagement afterwards.

Ad serving is infrastructure, not a vendor choice. Working across five serving and tracking platforms in eighteen months made it obvious how much of a campaign’s reported performance is an artefact of the measurement layer. That observation is what led, directly, to Prove’s decision to move clients onto first-party serving years before the industry was forced to.

Quillion wound down in 2010. Prove started from its bones.