Moncton-based Blaze Studios has launched a new digital administrative product for the advertising industry, and is gearing up to release more products in 2017.

Headed by Jason Lavigne, Blaze Studios is one of Canada’s largest open-source development shops, and also serves as an incubator for online products for advertising and marketing  industry. The latest is Zephyr, founded by Lavigne and Andrew MacKinnon, which uses artificial intelligence to reduce the amount of time ad agencies devote to time sheets, invoicing and the like.

“We’ve been working on zephyr for two years or so,” MacKinnon, the Chief Marketing Technologist, said in an interview last week, when it launched Zephyr. “It’s one of our internal projects. There are probably three or four more that are in different stages of development.”

MacKinnon said ad agencies spend more than US$5.5 billion each year on time-tracking software that requires workers to submit timesheets documenting how much time they spent on each client's projects each day.  In fact, agency management software is one of the largest expenses these outfits have, usually costing more than rent. 

On top of this, the agencies’ have to spend time filling out the forms and doing administrative tasks. There are estimates that the time spent on time sheets adds up to 65 million hours a year in North America alone. It works out to about one hour per employee per day, and this is not billable time.

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Zephyr automatically carries out all these tasks, using artificial intelligence to track the employee’s time, enter it to a databank and prepare and send invoices when appropriate. Priced to disrupt existing software, Zephyr also helps the agencies to prepare more precise estimates for clients because the artificial intelligence system can assess similar projects, and work done for the client previously, and estimate how much a new project will cost. It also provides data on the efficiency of agency employees.

MacKinnon said his team has spent two years discussing Zephyr with potential clients around North America, and more than 100 of them have said they’re interested in participating in the roll out.

The 10-member team at Blaze Studios has considerable experience in launching products. In 2013, they launched Iceberg, a simple, fast platform for submitting and judging creativity. Iceberg is now North America's largest provider of software for managing advertising and creative competitions. More than 2,000 North American advertising agencies are paid customers of Iceberg.

Asked what’s in store for Blaze in 2017, MacKinnon said the big thing is ramping up sales of Zephyr. Onboarding artificial intelligence platforms is an intensive process, so the company will have to spend time working with each customer.

“What we’re doing is we’re making transitioning to new product as easy as possible,” he said.

Meanwhile, the team will continue to work on other products, and MacKinnon’s expects a couple of launches in the next 12 months.

“What Blaze is is  … an incubator-slash-development house that will spin off products,” he said. “In addition to Zephyr, we expect to launch at least two products of similar size and scope [in 2017].”