Serious about Business

Mixpo selected as a top 25 Innovator & Entrepreneur

Seattle Business Monthly just announced their Power Players - Top 25 Innovators & Entrepreneurs in their October 8th, 2008 issue and Mixpo was selected.  Here's what they said about Mixpo:

The Next Generation of Online Advertising: Anupam Gupta (President & CEO, Mixpo)
In an age when video on the web is ubiquitous, advertisers need to be sharper in their approach and flashier in their delivery to get today’s internet audience to pay attention. Banner ads just won’t cut it anymore.

That’s where Delhi, India, native and MSN alum Anupam Gupta comes in. The 34-year-old president and CEO of online video ad startup Mixpo has developed a set of web-based services that help local businesses advertise online in a measurable and results-driven way.
“Over the last few years, video has grown online, and much of that is consumer video on sites like YouTube,” Gupta says. “There are a ton of eyeballs out there, so it’s natural to have advertising follow where the eyeballs are.”

Mixpo, with 17 employees, has developed a number of applications and platforms designed to make it easy for just about anybody to develop his or her own audio/visual advertisements that can be added to a website or embedded in other sites.

“Let’s say a real estate agent has 10 high-resolution photos of a house he’s trying to sell,” Gupta says. “You can use those images to create some compelling video using the Mixpo platform.”

The company, which raised $6.5 million in venture capital in 2006, also offers clients an extensive series of tools that allow businesses to track how many people click on an advertisement and even the general area where these people are located. Mixpo’s suite of web applications measures the number of impressions an ad generates, how many people start watching an ad and whether those people click on interactive components of the ad, such as a coupon. This information lets businesses of all sizes tailor advertisements specifically to a target audience, geographic region or even an individual community.

Mixpo rolled out its first web-based services at the beginning of 2007 and has steadily added new capabilities since then.
“It’s not just about creating and posting an ad online,” says Gupta of Mixpo’s power. “It’s about getting those videos discovered by search engines and putting them on local newspaper sites where people will see them.” —J.M.

Companies were selected because of their ability to change the local space we all reside in: the Puget Sound area known as Western Washington.  It's nice to be recognized locally as we help other local markets' publishers and advertisers across the country succeed.

Avvo Lawyers Take it Easy

We recently announced a partnership with Avvo - the online service that helps people navigate the complex world of finding the right attorney by providing detailed data and ratings on every attorney. 

How does video come in to play?  Video helps both parties by giving attorneys a better way to articulate their specialty, their expertise, and their manner as a legal advocate and gives buyers of legal services a way to sift through potentially pounds of information and cut to the chase on selecting an attorney that will largely be built on trust and confidence - something that video does better than any other format.

What is equally exciting to us about the partnership is that the Avvo members will leverage our platform in a self-serve way.  As Josh King says, Avvo's VP of Business Development and General Counsel, in an new, EASY Way in his blog post titled: 

Avvo - New, Easy Way to Get Your Lawyer Web Video

We know from our experience that for online video advertising to take off it has to be easy and effective - even in industries like the legal profession that has its share of smart people.  But even with smart people, time cannot be wasted.  Time IS money and for the folks at Avvo they realize that Mixpo can create a win-win for attorneys and shoppers knowing that video it can save them both time and money.

Video Banner Ads vs. Traditional Banner Ads - Measuring Effectiveness

Mark Robertson from ReelSEO posted an interesting article entitled, Video Banner Ads vs. Traditional Banner Ads - Measuring Effectiveness.  His article describes the REAL promise of online video - to drive more effective results for advertisers.  Citing a study done by Double Click from last year, Mark puts traditional banner ads (GIF and JPEG) to the test against in banner VIDEO ads and notes that, hands down, the video ads perform MUCH better than traditional banner ads at driving higher CTR. 

More than that, however, Mark talks about the inherent differences between tradtional banner ads and video based banner ads.   With tradtional banner ads there is only one objective - to drive click throughs - and to immediately take viewers away from the page they are on to another site. 

With in banner video ads, on the contrary, viewers select to click on the video ad but stay right there.  They watch the video ad and gather as much information as is available (vs. being limited to a 5 second flash presentation).  In the case of the Mixpo video ads, they can then select to click on a direct response button that takes them to the advertiser's web site when they are ready, or click to request more information right there in the player without having to leave the web site they are on. 

A better experience for the viewer where they don't have to leave a Web site abruptly, where they choose how they interact with the content that is presented to them, where they get more information and can then decide to take action.  A better ad for the advertiser because they are not limited to a :15 second pre-roll to tell their story and get more measurable results than CTR.  And a better value proposition for the publisher because their viewers can stay on their site longer, and they get better sell-through for their display ad inventory based on the fact that in banner video ads are more effective.

It's driving more effectiveness that is at the root of why online video is taking off and will do so at the expense of traditional banner ads.

Yes, Video a Hit with SMBs!

Online video is a hit with SMB's and will continue to be so as they realize that it can be so much more than hosting and publishing video.   Greg Sterling just released a post titled, " Yes, Video a Hit with SMBs." Greg says, "Much like websites, if you build it they won’t necessarily come." We agree 100% and have built our platform for driving measurable direct response and the ability to make your video ad campaigns more effective over time.  We invite you to check out. 

Local Online Advertising In Recessionary Times

An interesting article was just posted by Online Media Daily entitled, Report: Recession Fuels 50% Gain For Local Online Advertising, that speaks to the power of the internet. The article cites data from Borrell Associates that estimates local online advertising will increase to $13.1 Billion fueled by Small and Medium Sized Business spending.

At times like this where we either are or there is great speculation that we are in a recession, how can anyone project growth in advertising, especially among Small and Medium sized businesses? Gordon Borrell, CEO of Borrell Associates says it best, ""What happens in a recession is advertisers are forced to make more economical decisions about how to spend marketing dollars. And the Internet, as they've tested it over the last several years, is cheaper and seems to work."

Internet advertising CPMs, according to Borrell are almost three times lower than Yellow pages print ad CPM. There is a growing exodus of advertising dollars shifting online caused by these starkly lower costs and the measurability that online advertising brings.

And for the Small and Medium sized business that has always had to be smarter than the big brand marketer with their big ad budgets, "recession" may actually mean its a good time for small and medium sized advertisers as well as local publishers.

A Kelsey Conference Wrap Up

We’ve been here at the Kelsey Group conference on Drilling Down on Local ’08.  The focus of the event is on "catching the wave in local marketing" and specifically charting the transition from offline to online.  Fortunately the conference is right here in Seattle.  Actually two blocks from our office.

Some of the key themes I saw here were:

1) video is the next big thing in online video advertising
2) vertical marketing and the push to online (makes sense given the topic on local)
3) marketing that drives direct response

The show was impressive not just for the broad, strategic thinking that was evident from leaders throughout the directory, interactive media, publishing, and technology side, but also how the focus was really on drilling down to the local market.   Kate Kaye, Senior Editor at Click Z, said it best when she talked about not forgetting that for many SMBs you can't forget the personal level of investment they make.  These are businesses that make decisions at the dinner table that to them are big decisions.  She also went on to say that, for the SMB, results really matter and that direct response matters because at the end of the day it's their money.

We got a chance to demo our product at the conference and focused exactly on the points referenced above - that we need to move beyond the "promise" of video and to the real science of driving action for businesses.

We also got to listen to some great discussion on the state of old media versus new that highlighted the speed of advertising moving from offline to online.  One such session was lead by Peter Krasilovsky, the Program Director for this event, talking with Merrill Brown, Founder and Principal of MMB Media.  For a recap, check out John Cook's Venture Blog entitled: "Old media needs to wake up, or die."

For us, this conference was great, not just for the chance to demo our product, reconnect with lots of smart industry leading people, but also for the validation in our new platform (launched at Kelsey) and the confirmation that our focus on driving action through online video IS the end game goal for small and mid-market advertisers.

 

ActiveRain Members Speak Out!

Today, we just announced an agreement with ActiveRain, the nation's largest social networking site for real estate professionals, to offer our online video advertising platform to their 85,000+ member base. We've actually been already working with the folks at A|R and invite you to see some of the comments on the blog titled, "Mixpo versus Youtube! Who will be the Winner?"

Why display ads will change?

A very interesting article was posted in iMedia Connection, entitled: "Is display advertising dead?"  The article talks about the opportunity for display ads to morph from the "pushing" adverts to something more informative and from something that immediately takes consumers away from a site, to let's them interact right there through the ad.

This article is definitely worth a read. 

ReelSEO on Mixpo

Mark Robertson, in his blog ReelSEO, interviewed us recently about our take on Video Marketing for SMBs.   Mark also commented his perspective on the needs of the SMB market that we'd like to share.   In specific, we'd like to highlight the following:

"I consider a few core concepts of particular importance when for marketing/advertising for SMBs. Small business advertisers tend to gravitate towards more direct response vs. branding. With that in mind, advertising solutions should:

• have conversion elements as part of the creative
• be measurable
• be effective
• be easy to implement"

We like the phrase "brand response" and believe online video advertising has the ability to help local SMBs brand better online and still drive the action and interaction they desire.

We thank Mark for the opportunity to tell our story and, as usual, welcome your comments.

Online Video Brand Building

A recent post on Media Post's Online Video Insider entitled, "But Sir, What about Impressions?" brings some thought provoking context to brand building capabilities of the Web and accountability.  The emergence of online video advertising CAN provide advertisers, of any size and not just the big packaged goods ones, the ability to drive measurable brand impact - through longer view times and interaction - if people could only start seeing the branding world beyond the :15 second pre-roll. 

Of course, the notion of measurable results that drive brand impact (through action and interaction) is what Mixpo is all about.  It's nice to see others catching on to the notion.