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Advertising - Monday, March 10, 2008

Jivox Launches Sweet Video Ad Platform

Among the recent launches that we have seen, Jivox is one of the solid. If you know AdReady, think of this as AdReady meets video. AdReady provides templates to let you create banner ads. Jivox gives you templates to create video ads. We agree with the premise that if you can create a professional video ad it will help get more attention that a flat or flash banner ad. The big challenge here is do the video ads stand out or will they cause embarrassment. From what we have seen the Jivox ads stand out.

Jivox is currently free. It allows self-service users to place images, video clips and music files from Jivox's library or grab from you own video files into ad templates. You can then customize with copy and features like coupons and click-through promos.

Once an ad is made in the Jivox system, users define the demographics of their target audience and tell set a spend limits with flight dates Jivox says it has its own network to place the ads from there. So that's how the startup intends to make money - by taking a cut of that. While we like that idea in the long run, we think that Jivox is likely underestimating how tough it is to place ads with appropriate sites and we hope they would soon think about creating some partnerships with media buyers.

In addition to AdReady, we would say that Jivox competes with Spot Runner, EZShow, Visible World and AditAll.

We wrote up Jivox last Spring when it was in stealth and had raised seed funds. Now the company is emerging with more details indicating that the startup raised $2.7M in seed funding led by Opus Capital. The company is led by founder Diaz Nesamoney, who previously helped found data-base vendor Informatica, which went public, and Celequest, which was bought in 2007 by Cognos.

The San Mateo, CA and Bangalore, India-based startup has some impressive staff including Naren Nachiappan who was just VP and GM at Wind River.

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