Burned marketing partner makes overtures to Facebook, but this relationship may be toast

If you hear howling, look no further than the doghouse, current residence of HasOffers.

The chastened chief executive of this advertising marketing startup, which was recently shown the door by Facebook for violating data storage policies, apologized to the social media giant Tuesday and said his engineers have introduced new feature sets so the snafu never happens again.

“I’m sorry. I’m really sorry about it. Absolutely. We should should have pressed harder with the Facebook audit team and worked harder on the best ways to comply,” with the social media giants data storage and file sharing agreements, HasOffers CEO Peter Hamilton told VentureBeat.

HasOffers and Playhaven-Kontagent were both notified by Facebook earlier this month that they were no longer welcome partners in their mobile advertising agreements. Both players provide mobile analytics to customers that allows them to tell which mobile advertising campaigns are generating the best traffic, or clicks.

HasOffers does not monetize their clicks, nor does it sell advertising.

Facebook’s decision is a potentially big hit for both startups and the mobile advertising space at large, said Creative Strategies analyst Ben Bajarin.

“I do think it is a big deal,” Bajarin said. “The nature of advertising is changing with an eye to mobile. Companies are now figuring out how to best capture ads from the desktop to the mobile space.”

The mobile advertising arena is expected to grow from $11.4 billion from 2013 to $24.5 billion in 2016, Bajarin said.

Playhaven-Kontagent chief executive Andy Yang did not respond to multiple emails for comment.

A Facebook spokesperson said both startups violated the contracts.

Facebook was up front from the beginning about how the relationship would work, the spokesperson added, and there “was no miscommunication on our part.”

The spokesperson declined to comment whether the social media titan would work with either companies ever again.

The agreement with Facebook and its existing mobile marketing partners, including Apsalar, Trademob, and Localytics, stipulates that all data collected must be erased after 180 days and that information generated by the mobile analytics platforms be stored differently from Facebook’s.

Facebook still has over a dozen mobile advertising partners.

Hamilton expressed contrition at the blowout.

“We needed to be storing Facebook’s data in a different channel, but it wasn’t clear to us at the time we weren’t doing it right. So now, we’ve created a whole new feature set for purging data,” Hamilton said.

HasOffers has 144 employees and his headquartered in Seattle. Revenue for the company clocked in at $19 million last year, and Hamilton projects that number to reach $45 million by the end of 2014.

Hamilton said Facebook’s decision was a minor setback for his startup but that a majority of his clients, whom he declined to name, continue to support him. Less than one percent of HasOffer’s revenue derived from their Facebook account.

“Today we are already 100 percent compliant with the 180-day data-deletion policy. I do wish we could have moved faster, but we were hoping for more clarity before pursing various tech solutions,” Hamilton said.

“These events have inspired us to create custom data deletion tools to make sure partners and advertisers can easily work with each other in the future,” he added.