It’s a Brainient New Year
As you may have seen, we’ve raised $1.8M from a few fantastic investors, backers of companies like DataXu, AdSafe Media and RevenueMax. I’m thrilled and very excited, because I think 2012 will be the year advertisers start using video for more than just reach and eyeballs.
My thesis around video is quite simple: all online advertising mediums besides video (search, social, display) are highly targeted, personalised and interactive. Even more, they’re all paid on performance (most often on a CPC). Video is still in the only advertising medium still paid on a CPM, very often poorly targeted, with no personalisation and no interactivity. That’s why we created Brainient. Video should be highly targeted, personalised, interactive and paid on performance – and we want to be the company to do it.
In order to deliver on this thesis, we created two products:
BrainRolls – an interactive video platform aimed at brand advertisers looking for viewer engagement rather than sales. It makes pre-rolls interactive enabling advertisers to engage their viewers. For example, BMW can enable viewers to book a test-drive, download a brochure or find near-by branches, right within the video ad. Engagement rates go up to 15%, which makes our advertisers really happy.
BrainAds – the first personalized video retargeting platform in the world, aimed at Direct Response advertisers looking to generate sales. Historically, video advertising has been all about reach and brand awareness. However, thanks to retargeting technology, RTB (real-time bidding) platforms and dynamic video processing algorithms, advertisers can now generate sales and build brand awareness at the same time. For example, an advertiser like ASOS.com can now retarget people with a pre-roll showing them the products they looked at on the site, right within the actual pre-roll.
We’ll be using the new financing to expand our client services and technology teams in London and Bucharest, and open a new office in New York. I’m looking forward to working together with the new investors to make Brainient the leading company in its space.