Spotzer or its investors seem to be in a hurry. The online video advertising agency today announced that it had closed a Series C round of funding. It was only last month that Spotzer had closed its Series B. Cyrte Investments, the telecom, media and technology fund based in Netherlands invested in the new round of funding.
As I have mentioned before Spotzer is building a similar platform to US based SpotRunner. Spotzer will deliver “highly” targeted pre-built ads in an automated manner to select media companies which can be either the likes of TV channels including CNN and Discovery or web platforms including Google and Yahoo. Spotzer claims that clients will be able to license, personalize, and run these ads for a remarkably low fees. I wonder how targeted these prebuilt ads can be as compared to what ScanScout can detect. Production cost does play a major role in video ads which definitely will be low in the case of Spotzer/SpotRunner. But does that mean users will watch them? Aside from that what’s the rush? 2 rounds of funding in 2 months. Signs of “irrational exuberance”?
Links:
Spotzer
April 20, 2007 at 2:30 am |
The look-alike pre-built ads that you describe will be the exact same as your competitor’s web video ad or TV ad. To avoid that branding problem smart advertisers will need a high quality custom-made TV ad and discount air time. An agency that reliably does this on the cheap is Cheap-TV-Spots.com. Cheap TV Spots is the most award-winning discount online TV ad agency in the world (it’s also the first international online TV ad agency in the world). The company is (or was) privately held. It may have been purchased recently by a large media conglomerate. They are opening an Asia-Pacific division and already have a presence in South America. Their success in this market is their value proposition which neither of your two subject companies can match. CheapTVSpots.com also passes all network discounts directly to their client without additional fees. Not many (if any) agencies still do that.