A platform helping advertisers customize and scale their video ads across digital channels is taking new investment to scale itself.
VidMob, based in New York with 13 global offices in 50 countries, announced a $110 million Series D investment led by Shamrock Capital, along with ID Fund, Drive by DraftKings, eGateway and PROOF.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Alex Collmer, Founder & CEO, VidM0b, explains the company’s proposition, and where it goes from here.
Accelerating intelligence
“This is all about bringing in resources to accelerate us,” Collmer says.
“Hopefully, this will give us the resources to accelerate that path, make our data systems even better and deliver more value to our clients and partners.”
VidMob offers what it calls “intelligence creative” – a machine learning system for generating insights on video campaign performance and customizing future creative based on those insights.
VidMob’s story
Collmer says such software is needed because digital marketing has become complex.
“Instagram is actually quite different than Snap, is quite different than TikTok, than Amazon et cetera,” he says. “You need to create specifically for each, if you want to maximise your performance on those.
“As we were getting performance information back from our platform partners – the Metas and Googles and Amazons – we could actually see how every piece of creative was performing.
“In 2017, we started realising, we could actually build a machine learning technology to sort of programmatically understand what’s happening inside every ad.
“Six years into building that, we’ve literally analysed trillions of impressions and are able to go back to marketers with really specific information about how different creative decisions are actually helping or hurting performance.”
Creative toolset
VidMob’s Agile Creative Studio analyzes video content including:
- Faces.
- Body movement.
- Emotions.
- Objects.
- Speed of words on screen.
- Music characteristics.
- Content of words on screen or being spoken.
- Relation of on-screen words to talked-about content.
- Trademarks and logos on-screen.
- Emotions on actors’ faces.
Creative over media
It marries those moments with performance data, feeding users insights that can lead to newly configured creative.
“You have a new piece of creative based on that data that you can put in market, like literally the next day,” Collmer says.
The studio includes access to VidMob’s network of video editors around the world, available to work on campaigns.
“Everyone expects to optimise their media and their audiences and everything for years,” Collmer ads. “But creative has always been the far more important part of results.”
