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Ad tech used to be a buzzy term.
Now it’s a bummer: Digital publishers, advertisers and readers blame all sorts of ills on the flood of companies trying to automate and optimize ad buying and selling. Investors who used to be excited about the industry now turn up their noses when you ask them about it.
But ad tech isn’t going away, and there are still plenty of people trying to figure out how to wring more money out of the digital ad business. Here’s one of them: Eyeview, which has figured out how to customize video ads based on the people looking at them.
That kind of tweaking is now pretty standard for display advertisers, but Eyeview has much less competition when it comes to video. The company says it can create hundreds or thousands of different versions of the same video ad by tweaking individual elements in them.
These aren’t the kind of high-concept spots that win Clio awards, but you can see how they could work:
Eyeview CEO Oren Harnevo is less interested in talking about his ads than he is about his results: While the company’s special sauce is its production process, his pitch isn’t tech-centric at all. Instead, he promises buyers that they will be able to see measurable returns on their investment, via a lift in sales.
Harnevo has just raised a $21.5 million round led by Israeli-based Qumra Capital; he says he has a few million dollars more coming from a set of strategic investors. The company has now raised $57 million in eight years.
Harnevo says it took him about half a year to raise this round, and that doing so was harder than it should have been, given that his company has a proven product which will be “getting to profitability soon, this year;” he says he figures that’s because the market is generally wary of all ad tech.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
