Online ads in video clips can deliver the highest rates online, so the trick for marketers is to get the most traffic by delivering the right video to each viewer.
Video marketing network AnyClip, based in Jerusalem and New York City, thinks it has a leg up on both factors. Although there has been talk that investment is slowing down for ad tech, the company is today announcing a new $21 million investment so it can expand its network beyond the 200,000+ sites and 40-80 million unique monthly visitors it currently claims.
There appears to be room to grow. The Internet Advertising Bureau has projected that video ad spending will increase this year by 46 percent over last year, to about $4.3 billion.
Launched in 2013, AnyClip’s platform analyzes video clip content and accompanying text descriptions, and categorizes them into 50 categories and more than 200 subcategories, plus adds other data points for later searches. It also analyzes the content of a web page to determine, for instance, if it’s about entertainment, cars, politics, or other subjects so it can deliver a contextually appropriate video clip and video ad.
Of course, this kind of smart video delivery makes sense, which is why AnyClip is not alone in this space. CEO and president Oren Nauman points to competing services from AOL, Blinkx, and NDN.
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Others include Paris-based Mediabong, which recently opened an office in New York City. Its tech analyzes what a story is about and then serves a related video stream with an ad, or just a standalone video ad.
New York City-based Genesis launched TVGenesis last fall, which provides video clips that are most appropriate to a page’s content.
Nauman said that one of AnyClip’s differences is that it only delivers premium Hollywood or TV content. Its site, for instance, features clips from the Dark Knight, trailers from new movies like Ant Man, and assembled clips like Great Dance Numbers or Knock-Out Fight Scenes.
In a 2009 essay on Business Insider, AnyClip cofounder and then-CEO Aaron Cohen described the reason behind the founding of the company the year before:
“We wanted to build a Web service,” he wrote, “that would allow anyone to find any moment from any film ever made instantly.”
Nauman told me the founders “understood that a movie or TV series lost value shortly after it ended.” They wanted, he said, “to find a way to get people to revisit and re-engage with this content.”
The other co-founders included former President and CEO of Sony America, Michael Schulhof, who is currently CEO and General Partner of investment firm GTI.
Two other differentiators, per Nauman: the targeting capability of the company’s unique “Sense and Match” contextual technology, and its SafePlay technology which weeds out bots and helps verify viewability of all videos and ads.
The new funding, which brings the total raised thus far to $30 million, will be used for global expansion, a strengthening of the company’s presence in the U.S., and acquisitions.
This round included new investors Ervington investments (representing Russian businessman Roman Abramovich) and Limelight Networks, as well current investors Jerusalem Venture Partners and GTI.
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