Simon Factor and Kevin Magee, Vidiro
Business & Finance looks at Ireland’s promising emerging enterprises.
What is it?
Vidiro context-driven data enables ad buyers to run high-impact, better value, targeted ad campaigns on YouTube. Their expertise is context-based information retrieval – out of the 400 hours published on YouTube every minute they find the videos of the moment that people love and those publishing them. Context means that the viewer is more likely to engage, recall and act on the targeted ad and its core message. Vidiro is based at NexusUCD, the Industry Partnership Centre at University College Dublin.
Who’s behind it?
Simon Factor has been working in the digital video space for well over a decade; he set up his first company Moving Media Studios in Dublin 2003. By 2008 it had expanded to Los Angeles. Kevin Magee was an early entrepreneur, starting his first business at 20. He later worked as director of engineering for global eLearning firm Smartforce.
How is it funded?
The founders invested personal capital and purposely avoided the VC route. They believe they can partner with investors to scale their business in the future, and in the early days received Enterprise Ireland Competitive Start-Up Funding and the UK equivalent, IC Tomorrow.
Future plans?
The online video advertising market is rapidly growing. They launched their second advertising solution earlier this year. Ad Radar was deployed on the pre-launch advertising of a high-profile cult UK TV show and achieved an 80% completion rate on ads served at a €15 CPM rate. Now that we have some good data to promote the efficacy of their product they are starting new campaigns with agencies in Ireland and the UK and have recently announced a partnership with an established London-based full-service digital agency.
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