Brainient, a personalised video retargeting solution, announced today it is raising a new round of funding. Here CEO Emi Gal discusses the new raise and the Brainient video offering.

Can you give some overview on the current Brainient offering?

Brainient's goal as a company is to make video advertising more effective. We measure effectiveness through brand uplift and viewer engagement for brand advertisers, and sales for DR advertisers. We currently have two products in the market to satisfy these two categories:

BrainRolls, an interactive video platform aimed at brand advertisers looking to increase the engagement of their video ads by making them interactive. For example, while watching a BMW video pre-roll a consumer can book a test-drive, download a brochure or watch more videos about the brand right within the video advert. The average CTR on our BrainRolls is 3% (three times higher than the market average), engagement rates (the number of people that play with our interactive elements) range from 10% to 15% and we usually double the dwell time (people will spend 60 seconds on a 30 seconds pre-roll).

BrainAds, the first and only personalised video retargeting platform in the world. This product helps DR advertisers increase brand awareness while maintaining the performance of their budgets. We've discovered that many retailers get to a point when they're interested in building a brand rather than just generating sales and BrainAds is perfect for these types of advertisers. Our average CTR is 3% (three to five times higher than display retargeting), post-click conversions go up to 10% and we can also measure brand uplift by surveying people.

Is your personalised video retaregeting a DR play? Isn’t video all about about branding and upper funnel activity?

Historically, video has been all about brand uplift and upper funnel activity, because it's quite expensive and charged on a CPM basis. However, we think there's value in helping DR advertisers increase brand awareness while maintaining the performance of their budgets, provided that you can find a way to charge them on a CPC basis and still make money. The proposition of BrainAds is helping DR advertisers generate sales and increase brand awareness at the same time. We charge on a CPC basis, making BrainAds the only video solution in the UK not charging advertisers on a CPM.

Who do you see as your key competitors in the space? Would you compete against the likes of Criteo, Struq and MyThings?

We see BrainAds as complementary to display retargeting. We're never going to be able to be as cost effective as display retargeting because the cost of media is much higher in video than it is in display. However, advertisers can complement their display retargeting campaigns with video retargeting, which will help them increase brand awareness. In the end, better brand awareness means more sales and better conversion rates.

How is Brainient positioning itself in the market? Is it an ad network or pure technology offering? Can anyone use your solution?

With our BrainRolls product, we act as a technology provider and license our platform to ad networks and publishers in the UK. We have networks like Adconion, FOX Networks and Advideum offering our interactive formats to their advertisers.

With BrainAds, the technology infrastructure is much more complex which requires us to essentially act as a retargeting network. We buy inventory in real-time from a number of exchanges on a CPM basis and add a layer of performance on top (through retargeting and personalisation). We then charge DR advertisers on a CPC basis, in the same way display retargeting companies do.

How does personalised video retargeting work?

On the targeting front, it's very similar to display retargeting. We install a tag on the advertiser's site and anonymously track the user's behaviour. We use the data to calculate the probability for a user to buy a specific product.

On the creative front, we've built a fantastic piece of technology that allows us to map various areas in a video and dynamically replace those areas with our own data, in real-time. The data can be displayed either through an overlay on the video or right within the video ad (e.g: we can replace a painting on a wall with a product image). You can see a live demo here: http://brainient.com/products/brainadsdemo

You have just raised another round of funding from Atlas Ventures. Will look to build out new technology or sales resource with the new fund raise?

The plan is to expand our technology and sales teams in Bucharest and London and open a new office in New York. We're thrilled of having Atlas Venture on board, given their experience with companies like DataXu or Adsafe Media.

As a European ad tech startup, have you found it difficult to raise capital in the market?

I wouldn't say it was difficult, but the problem with European investors is that very few of them really understand ad-tech. Most VCs I've seen didn't really get the industry, which means they wouldn't have been able to add much more value beyond the cash.