Deal Radar 2009: SpotMixer

There’s no question that shrinking ad budgets and the decline of print ads have shaken the foundations of traditional and often powerful media outlets, from ABC to the Boston Globe. Online video advertising, however, is growing in this poor economy, albeit at a slower place. One company taking advantage of this growth is One True Media’s SpotMixer.

Co-founded by John Love after he experienced firsthand the difficulties of mixing and sharing online video, One True Media launched in 2005. The company sought to make online video creation easy and affordable for non-technical users. Noticing that businesses were using its video creation tools to produce videos for their websites, One True Media launched SpotMixer.com to address these businesses’ needs.

The site, targeted at small and medium sized businesses, enables clients to create professional videos and reach customers more effectively with video, both online and on cable TV. The new version of the SpotMixer platform, which went live last week, offers a 30-day free trial of the company’s online video marketing service. This includes features such as a high resolution download of the video; a video web page optimized for search engines; easy embed codes and links to add video to websites and e-mail; and posting the video to YouTube. The new release will also include new stock content, several new templates (some of which are optimized for direct marketing messages and the updating of existing ads with custom text endings), font and color selection options for text within templates. The aim is to provide a more streamlined and effective process for targeting online video advertising and allow users to add text slides with font and color selections.

The company, which faces competition from Mixpo, Jivox, SpotRunner and Aditall, pegs its total available market at approximately 8 million small and medium businesses that have a web presence. Its targets are local SMBs like professional services and hospitality businesses who usually stick to traditional local advertising and SEO/SEM, and performance-oriented direct marketers, whether regional or national.

The target clients for online video marketing are those who are new to online marketing, while the target for online video advertising is those who currently use or are experienced in online marketing and advertising through search engine marketing/display ads. Finally, the cable TV advertising solutions are meant for current cable TV advertisers or SMBs interested in cable TV who are likely to be traditional advertisers in radio, newspaper, etc.

SpotMixer offers a 30-day trial for online video marketing, charges $49 per month after the trial period and allows users to cancel the contract anytime. With online video advertising, users can set their own budgets, which can start at $10 a day. With cable TV advertising, One True Media charges $149 per video. It provides customer support across all three forms of advertising, but other features differ with the type of advertising the user chooses.

SpotMixer says it did not have too much difficulty in gaining traction since business users crossed over from One True Media, which has 4 million registered users who create 60,000 videos every week. Also, SpotMixer is offered as a partner-platform with several companies including Google, Intuit, SuperPages.com, and YellowBook, wherein SpotMixer is integrated within partner sites offering video creation and distribution services to partners’ customers. Today, SpotMixer has been used by tens of thousands advertisers to create and distribute business videos. However, the company did not disclose the names of the advertisers.

SpotMixer has raised a total of $16 million in venture capital so far: a $7 million Series A with Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers as lead investor; and a $9 million Series B from DAG Ventures as the lead investor, KPCB and NTT Finance in January 2009. Though it is making money, like competitor Jivox, SpotMixer is not yet profitable.

Suggested Reading:
*Deal Radar 2009: Jivox
*Deal Radar 2008: Mixpo
*Deal Radar 2008: IVT

This segment is a part in the series : Deal Radar 2009