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Advertising - Monday, June 16, 2008

Video Ads' Jivox Raises $10.7M

The a:c had previously posted that we thought the launch of Jivox was "sweet." Today the startup indicated that hit has closed a Series A round of funding at $10.7M. The round was led by Opus Capital, along with New investor Helion Venture Partners.

We like the idea behind Jivox. They have launched a self-service platform to create online video ads. They will then place the ads for you - all for a fee.

The creation of online video ads for most companies would be an expensive ordeal. And yet video ads make so much sense. Jivox has pulled together video templates so that advertisers don't even have to film anything, just customize.

Moreover, Jivox is led by CEO Diaz Nesamoney who had founded Informatica (Nasdaq: INFA) and Celequest (acquired in 2007 by Cognos). In some cases we might see this is a knock. It's hard to go from the boardroom at a public company back to a startup. And Nesamoney doesn't have experience running an online ad startup. But so far so good from the outside.

Jivox boasts that since launch it has developed reach to 40M viewers. We tend to view such statements with sceptacism. 40M impressions in a month is not much for an ad network, its even less if it is over many months and it means little if we are talking about international traffic.

But Jivos does say that it has signed distrubtion deals with Brown Publishing, ExpoTV, AOL India, Sulekha.com, and Bigadda.com. We don't see permenant placements on these sites but believe there must be some placement or Jivox would not be making this statement.

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