Shakr Media hooks $2.3 million in a Series A round to expand tech platform. Their sole investor is POSCO Venture Capital, who assisted with receiving funds from the South Korean government.
The new round comes after a previous seed round of $700,000. Shakr Media brings video advertising at an affordable cost- making it accessible to smaller businesses. The company automatically creates video clips from snippets of information from their in-house algorithm-like that crawls the web.
At the moment in order to produce a marketing video campaign on Youtube the production costs can run up a bill to tens of thousands of dollars. Something a smaller company could not afford and thus missing out on the marketing opportunities larger companies enjoy. David Lee, Founder and CEO explained that they are opening the door for smaller companies to reap the marketing benefits of video advertising.
ComScore published a study revealing that 46.6 billion videos were watched by 187.8 million Americans this year in March. The total ads viewed amounted to 28.7 billion.
"When we launched in May of last year, we focused on personal video templates. One day, a company that does custom video ad design sent us a few templates for small businesses. A friend of mine who works at Google happened to be in our office at the time, and he pointed out that having a large number of video ad templates could help a lot of small businesses advertise on YouTube, where the rates for pre-roll ads are quite affordable," Lee said.
TechCrunch parallels the venture to Google Ads making banner ads accessible to smaller companies with a lower budget around a decade ago. Hence, their belief of the video ad becoming accessible as potentially 'revolutionizing' the advertising world once again as Google Ads had done.
"GS Caltex, the gas station that I fill up at on my way home, has 3 giant LCD screens running ads for big brands. Every convenience store has 1 to 3 video screens running ads. Video ads running in residential and commercial elevators. Subways and buses even have digital displays running ads and original content. Digital billboards everywhere," says Lee. "Every day, we see first hand how video is helping businesses tell their stories more effectively."
Shakr Media was founded in 2005 and operates offices in San Francisco and in Seoul, South Korea.
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