Q&A with Diaz Nesamoney, CEO of Jivox
SUB: What is your primary value proposition for users?
Diaz Nesamoney: Jivox helps small businesses reach customers with online video advertising. We provide advertisers with an online, self-service tool to create high-impact video ads using stock footage, images, music or their existing video assets. Jivox ensures high-quality placement of customer ads through the Jivox Publisher Network, a locally-focused network of premium publishers that includes more than 500 local TV stations, newspapers, weather and other specialty web sites, and offers geographic ad targeting at the city level as well as demographic and contextual targeting.
The Jivox video ad creation and distribution platform is cost-effective and easy to use, putting video advertising in reach of smaller and local businesses for the first time. With Jivox, advertisers don’t need to undertake the expensive and cumbersome process of hiring a video production agency, engaging a separate ad creative agency and then lining up disparate video ad networks to place their ads. They just log onto Jivox, create their video ads with drag-and-drop functionality, and then instantly get the ads placed across web sites on the Jivox Publisher Network, which today reaches more than 60 million engaged Internet consumers.
SUB: When was the company founded, and how did the idea come about?Diaz Nesamoney: I founded the company in early 2007, because I had just sold my previous firm, Celequest, to Cognos. I wanted to start another business, and I thought hard about what was missing in the market. It was obvious to me that video advertising is going to be the next wave of Internet advertising, but that the way the video ad creation market works today, it’s largely out of reach of smaller businesses. And yet smaller and local advertisers are eager to spend on video advertising. Recent research from The Kelsey Group estimates that the local online video advertising market in the U.S. will grow to $1.5 billion by 2012, up from just $10.9 million in 2007, and that local businesses will spend nearly 12 percent of their ad budgets on video by 2012. So I started Jivox to make video advertising accessible to smaller and local advertisers. We also work with creative agencies, which use Jivox to create compelling, engaging video ads for their clients—without breaking the budget.
SUB: Who do you see as your competition?
Diaz Nesamoney: Some companies we consider to be in our space include Mixpo, Spotmixer and Spotrunner. But none are exactly like our model, which combines self-service video ad creation, optimization, targeted placement on our own Publisher Network made up of hundreds of quality web sites, and advanced campaign reporting.
SUB: Can you describe the underlying technology behind the site, and how the
site works for users?
Diaz Nesamoney: The Jivox platform combines state-of-the-art ad serving and targeting with a sophisticated video editor. The platform supports business decisions with robust reports and dashboards.
Jivox is easy to use. Creating an ad on Jivox is a simple three-step process that can be completed in minutes. Advertisers and agencies simply create an account, launch the Jivox AdSlate video ad maker, and start browsing our library of stock images, video clips and music to create a video ad. They can also upload existing materials, such as a digital picture of a storefront, product shots, headshots, or logos, and insert contact information, web site address, and a direct response element such as special discounts, promotions or coupons. Once they’re happy with the ad, advertisers use Jivox AdSlate’s point-and-click targeting system to set up a target audience for their ad distribution. Lastly, advertisers enter their budget parameters for the campaign, specifying a maximum budget, campaign run dates, and identify specific times of day, days of the week, and other important choices that impact the ad performance. Unlike most other forms of TV and web advertising, with Jivox, advertisers pay only for ads that are actually viewed.As soon as a video ad starts running, the advertiser can use Jivox Ad Campaign Reports to get details on how it’s performing, and then easily optimize the ad on-the-fly to obtain better results.
