In today’s sea of endless ads, creatives have to be memorable, longer lasting, cost-efficient and engaging in order to stand out. The advent of digital advertising provides an unprecedented opportunity for brands to test, iterate, and optimize their creatives quickly unlike traditional legacy ad formats. VidMob is an intelligent creative management platform that enables marketers to understand the performance of their creatives across all channels in order to optimize their campaigns. The platform works across Google, Meta, Amazon Ads, TikTok, LinkedIn, Twitter, Snap, Pinterest, Hulu, and Reddit. In addition to the analytics component, the company also offers a creative marketplace for brands to secure and scale their creative production talent. VidMob has grown its revenue 110% year-over-year for the last four years by empowering advertisers to optimize their marketing spend and increase their digital ad spend share with concrete metrics.
AlleyWatch caught up with VidMob Founder and CEO Alex Collmer to learn more about the business, the company’s strategic plans, latest round of funding, which brings the total funding raised to $231.6M, and much, much more…
Who were your investors and how much did you raise?
$110M. Series D led by Shamrock Capital and included eGateway Capital Advisors, PROOF, ID Funds, Drive by DraftKings.
Tell us about the product or service that VidMob offers.
VidMob is a software platform for marketers that helps them understand which creative decisions are helping or hurting performance on all of the various channels that they are utilizing, and then immediately act on those insights to improve their ad creative based on that data.
What inspired the start of VidMob?
VidMob was created in 2014 based on the idea that as digital communications evolved from easier formats (text and images) to harder formats (video, AR, and metaverse), all marketers were going to struggle to communicate effectively. We believed that technology needed to be built to help scale and augment human creativity, thus helping marketers improve the results of their digital marketing efforts.
How is VidMob different?
VidMob created the category of Intelligent Creative, starting in 2017. Today, we are the only company with a software platform to bring data and creativity together in a way that enables creative insights to be actioned immediately with data-driven creative. This loop of learning and creating enables our clients to be far more agile in their creative production, and drive dramatically improved results by allowing them to optimize their creative in addition to traditional media-side optimization.
What market does VidMob target and how big is it?
VidMob is targeting both the creative production and analytics underlying all digital communications. This is a multi-hundred billion dollar market.
What’s your business model?
It is a SaaS model – clients subscribe to our platform so that they can access Creative Intelligence on all of the platforms upon which they are communicating. They then utilize our marketplace to respond to the resultant insights with improved creative.
How are you preparing for a potential economic slowdown??
It is helping us, as our clients are looking for ways to improve the performance of their ad creative so that they can get more with less.
What was the funding process like?
It was a good process. Investors are understandably more discerning in the current environment, but companies with strong metrics and a compelling opportunity are still able to access financing.
What are the biggest challenges that you faced while raising capital?
The biggest challenge was that there were certain times where the investor group as a whole felt like they didn’t know how to price companies anymore. This uncertainty extended the process a bit.
What factors about your business led your investors to write the check?
VidMob’s growth rate has accelerated in each of the past 4 years, and we are on track to see that trend continue in 2022. Also, VidMob is seen as an important response to the loss in ad performance as audience-based targeting loses effectiveness in the wake of Apple’s ATT policy and the impending deprecation of Cookies. In this environment, businesses are looking to make creative work harder as a means to counter the loss in effectiveness from privacy changes.
What are the milestones you plan to achieve in the next six months?
We plan on doubling the size of the business this year.
What advice can you offer companies in New York that do not have a fresh injection of capital in the bank?
I would simply say that companies need to recognize that we are in a different era in 2022 than we were before that. Growth now needs to be growth and profitability. As a result, smart businesses are doing what they can to ensure their operating model reflects the new reality.
I would simply say that companies need to recognize that we are in a different era in 2022 than we were before that. Growth now needs to be growth and profitability. As a result, smart businesses are doing what they can to ensure their operating model reflects the new reality.
Where do you see the company going now over the near term?
In many ways, we are simply expecting more of the same, albeit at a faster rate. We expect to see our product roadmap accelerate, with a growing focus on commerce and expanding Creative Intelligence beyond just digital ads into the creative underlying the whole commerce journey and all of the surrounding communications. We also expect to see our push into international markets to continue accelerating.
What’s your favorite restaurant in the city?
L’ Artusi and Mel’s Burger Bar. Both are great places, and the owners are also old friends from college.
