Honor and integrity are at the heart of everything ONAR (OTCQB:RELT) does.
ONAR (OTCQB:RELT), pronounced “honor,” owns and operates highly specialized marketing and advertising service companies that provide a range of services including performance marketing, branding, digital marketing, experiential marketing, and healthcare marketing.
It recently rebranded to ONAR (OTCQB:RELT) from Integrum Worldwide and debuted on the OTCQB under the ticker symbol “RELT” following a reverse merger with Reliant Holdings.
“We liked the play on words with the idea of being honorable and acting with integrity,” CEO Claude Zdanow told Proactive.
The CEO said the company has taken a top-down approach to rebranding to ensure ONAR (OTCQB:RELT) has a “clear, concise, understandable, digestible brand.”
The rebrand to ONAR is more than just a name change. It also emphasizes the company’s commitment to delivering technology-powered marketing solutions to middle-market firms across a range of sectors.
Investing in your brand is especially important if you want to grow a business in the marketing and advertising space, Zdanow highlighted.
“Honor also means ‘dream’ in Greek and for us, it is a dream and an aspiration to build this business and company,” he said.
The company’s flagship digital marketing agency is called Storia, a reference to the importance of storytelling in getting a brand’s message across to the ideal customer.
It recently rebranded Storia, which included a clean watermark and a logo featuring an upward arrow to symbolize the firm’s focus on delivering measurable results for its clients.
“We want new customers and the market to understand what the business does. Not just ONAR the parent company, but each one of our individual brands,” Zdanow said.
In addition to Storia, ONAR has two other subsidiaries: Chalk, engaged in experiential marketing and events, and VMed (which is also rebranding), which specializes in healthcare marketing.
AI-empowered digital performance marketing
What sets ONAR’s digital performance marketing agency Storia apart is the fact it is driven by artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning.
The majority of its business is with B2C companies and it creates and deploys creative across all digital mediums from Google Search to TikTok and retail media.
“Anywhere there is a means to get an advertisement in front of a consumer, that’s what Storia specializes in,” Zdanow said.
Storia leverages AI in a range of ways, including crafting creative, attribution, and predictive decision-making related to campaign performance and dollar and advertising spend.
“We are taking large amounts of data and helping customers make better decisions on how much money to spend, where to spend that money, and then how to ramp that spend,” Zdanow explained.
“It’s all about placing advertisements in front of the right person at the right time on the right medium.”
The company’s proprietary way of deploying AI sees a 25% to 35% increase in return on ad spend when compared to carrying out the same campaign manually, Zdanow said.
It can also produce about 10 times as much creative as it was able to previously.
“By leveraging AI, we’re able to much more efficiently create more iterations and more variants, and also make sure the creative fits for all the different media platforms that we’re working on,” he told Proactive.
Serving middle-market companies
ONAR’s focus is on providing small and medium-sized businesses with marketing and advertising services that may not usually be available to them.
Zdanow highlighted that as the digital marketing industry has grown from paid click advertising, it has become dense making it challenging for small and medium-sized businesses to access the same level of effectiveness as major corporations.
And with the proliferation of technology, he expects there to be a surge in these middle-market firms with annual revenue in the $10 million to $100 million range.
“We have large companies as clients but we’re focused on being able to serve middle-market companies that maybe get overlooked by agencies chasing Fortune 500 firms and give them the same advantage as if they were a Fortune 500 or Fortune 100 company,” Zdanow said.
“We are focused on solving problems for executive teams that don’t have the full-on marketing that Coca-Cola has but still need that firepower and a partner that understands their needs and business goals and has a way of doing advertising that aligns with those business goals.”
Vital to this is ONAR’s productized offering. Unlike other firms, the company does not charge its clients based on a percentage of ad spend but by how much creative is required and what platforms are being used.
“Our clients basically get a bazooka of firepower even though they are a small or medium-sized company,” Zdanow said.
Targeted acquisitions
A key part of ONAR’s growth strategy is acquisitions. Zdanow explained that as the company expands, it is looking to bring on additional specialized businesses, not generalist businesses.
“We want to acquire companies that are focused on doing one or two things really well that ideally can fit into its existing three verticals,” he said.
“The easiest way to acquire firms is finding ones with comparable services to grow our customer base and expert team.”
ONAR will also target firms with complimentary service offerings, with Zdanow citing public relations, corporate communications, and investor relations as examples.
“Those are services that each of our existing clients is using elsewhere. If we can offer that ourselves, we could build a fourth vertical,” he said.
Zdanow used the analogy of the automaker Ford Motor Company (NYSE:F), known for its iconic F150 pickup truck but that also produces the performance sports car the Mustang.
“They’re built by the same company but the brands are very different. You have that optionality within a brand family, and that’s how we look at what we’re doing.”
First backed by the private equity firms Apollo Capital and M2B, ONAR now has the financial support of a host of institutions which Zdanow believes will allow it to keep making acquisitions and growing the business.
ONAR’s goal is to achieve a $100 million market capitalization and uplist to the NASDAQ stock exchange within two years.
“We’re on a path to build the company and set it up in a way for us to grow both organically and through acquisitions,” Zdanow said.
With a clear vision and robust financial backing, ONAR is well on its way to realizing its aspirations of becoming a major player in the marketing and advertising industry.