The media business is obsessed with video ads. Justin Fuisz says his video ads are better — because you can click on them.
Fuisz Media Raises $10 Million for Video Ads You Can Touch
Go ahead, try it.
Fuisz Media
Peter Kafka covered media and technology, and their intersection, at Vox. Many of his stories can be found in his Kafka on Media newsletter, and he also hosts the Recode Media podcast.
His Fuisz Media has been working on this idea for a couple of years, and now he has a bit of validation in the form of a $10 million A round led by Evolution Media Partners, along with a bunch of media executives and companies. That comes on top of the $2 million seed round he raised last year.
Fuisz started out working on an idea to make TV shows “shoppable,” but pivoted into his current business, which is supposed to make it easy to take existing videos and make them interactive. He charges ad buyers a CPM premium to soup up their clips, and says that some months his 40-person company has been generating around $1 million in sales.
The last time we checked in on Fuisz, he said his ads worked on just about every device — except for the Web browsers on iPhones. That’s been fixed and now the ads work on those, too, he says. So you should be able to see this:
Eventually, Fuisz says, he thinks his company can move beyond advertising and offer its tech/platform to a wider group of video makers who could benefit from interactive videos.
I saw him backstage last week at Vidcon, the YouTube fan convention that drew 21,000 people to the Anaheim Convention Center to see their favorite video stars. Some of them might want to use his product one day, too, he says.
First things first, though: For now his target is CMOs.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
