Video advertising seems to be booming these days, with more and more platforms being launched or revamped. Video ad products are diversifying rapidly and the competition is getting fiercer by the minute, quite an interesting market to watch.
In the not-so-little list of new apparitions in the video advertising landscape, one in particular drew my attention: Jivox. In their own words, “Jivox is a web-based video advertising service enabling businesses to better communicate their products and services to a micro-targeted audience in a more customized, relevant way than most traditional mass advertising methods, and internet banners and search engines.” Jivox has headquarters in San Mateo, California, and offices in Bangalore and Delhi in India.
Their story starts only several months ago, in March 2008, when announcing a $2.7M seed financing to launch a new online video ad platform. The company has moved rapidly since then, growing to over 40 million viewers in only 3 months, by mid June. Jivox has recently closed $10.7 million series A round of financing led by Opus Capital, an early-stage venture capital firm. New investor Helion Venture Partners, an India-focused venture fund, also participated in the round, along with Jivox’s existing investors.
Jivox markets itself as a “self-service online video advertising platform for local businesses”, giving smaller and local advertisers access to online video advertising by making it easy to create, target and deliver online video ads. The Jivox platform combines a self-service video ad creation tool, proprietary targeting technology, and a growing network of publishers to offer advertisers complete, do-it-yourself service for online video advertising.
Unlike most other video ad companies, Jivox gets interesting by targeting the long tails of advertisers, who are promised opportunities to lower the production cost of video ads — significantly more expensive than online banner ads, for instance — while making the technology to create those ads more accessible.
I haven’t been able yet to find what Jivox’s current portfolio of advertisers look like, but a June 2 press release mentions that over 300 advertisers were registered, with Faultline Brewing Company Restaurant winning the advertiser of the month title. It’s yet to be seen how Jivox and their video ad product will evolve on short and medium term but it’s certainly a start-up to follow.
