The Company Sees a 592% YoY Increase in Revenue from the First Quarter of 2022
KERV Interactive, a digital advertising platform, today announced strong results from the first half of 2022, with revenue from the first quarter experiencing an increase of 592 percent year-over-year. The company is on track to see a total revenue increase of over 160 percent year-over-year. KERV also recently announced it raised $12 million in growth capital.
In tandem with its growing revenue, KERV has also more than doubled its workforce since the start of 2022. KERV’s flexible office policy has enabled significant growth of its team across the United States, with employees in Texas, New York, Georgia, Illinois, California, and Detroit.
Additionally, KERV has continued to enhance its technology by investing significantly in product updates. By doing this, KERV is able to provide cutting-edge advertising technology that keeps brands on track to meet business goals in a dynamic marketplace.
The numerous updates to the KERV product stack include:
- An expansion of the campaign data that clients have access to in the KERV Radius Platform. Clients can now view data down to the individual interactions on specific objects featured in a video.
- An update to the KERV Video Approval Console (VAC) further streamlines the approval process between clients and KERV’s operations team when creating interactive elements in video.
- Continued investment and development in KERV Vision and, KERV’s API offerings, which power its ability to sync and correlate objects and products to visual cues within any video content.
- Updates to KERV TV to expand the shoppable content that can be pushed through CTV, ATV and OTT.
- A new, one-of-a-kind integration with TikTok that streamlines the automation and optimization of shoppable products in TikTok Collection Ads.
“We’ve always focused on providing innovative technology that helps our clients bridge the gap between content and commerce, and makes their video content work harder for them,” said CEO Gary Mitman, “Throughout the rest of this year, we’ll continue investing in both our technology and our team to ensure they are able to continue succeeding.”
About KERV Interactive
Austin-based KERV is a digital advertising platform built on patented technology to create shoppable and immersive experiences within video. Using machine learning techniques and AI to drive speed and precision, only KERV’s technology recognizes depth, dimension, and objects in a video in real-time more accurately than the human eye. The platform’s ability to make shoppable video has shown to be successful across the web, mobile, social and CTV. Only KERV delivers a truly unique shopping experience for consumers and brands.
View original content to download multimedia:
Challenge
Sambucol, the Original Black Elderberry brand, was looking for innovative ways to use video to connect with their targeted audience and raise awareness and purchase consideration for their immune support products. They needed a solution that would:
- Provide a dynamic QR code to drive users to landing pages
- Retarget engaged users with multi-retailer versions of the creative
- Provide a direct to retailer user experience via video
They recognized the opportunity to leverage KERV’s technology and transform the passive encounters of standard pre-roll video into an active one, inviting consumers to engage with the brand and its products directly.
Solution
Using KERV TV, Sambucol was able to add dynamic QR codes to their video ads and then use the unique, first-party data captured by KERV to retarget with multi-retailer versions of their creative using KERV Shop. This allowed them to provide a direct path for consumers to purchase Sambucol’s Black Elderberry products from their preferred retailer.
Results
KERV Report
Overall, KERV TV drove a significant lift in awareness and reach. By retargeting with KERV Shop, Sambucol dramatically increased product engagement.
KERV TV
- QR scans: 667
- Completion Rate: 97.81% (exceeded benchmark by 3%)
- Additional earned minutes: 2,870,936
KERV Shop
- Clickthrough rate: 3.79% (exceeded the benchmark by 658%)
- Interaction rate: 12.88% (exceeded the benchmark by 1617%)
Brand Lift Report
KERV’s technology is able to capture data at the unique object level, making it possible to create user segments against any of the interactive objects shown within a video creative. With this in mind, KERV was able to structure a clean brand lift throughout the campaign that delineated users into the standard brand lift study buckets: exposed and unexposed. KERV was also able to introduce a third, more qualified bucket of data consisting of users who were exposed and interacted with the KERV’d video assets. This unique group of users can help brands like Sambucol better understand the lift associated with KERV’s interactive ad experiences.
Sambucol specifically wanted to measure KERV’s ability to provide lift in purchase intent. The question utilized for this brand study asked, “When shopping for immune support, which of the following brands are you most likely to consider?”
The test was extremely successful in highlighting the value of leveraging KERV’s technology to increase purchase consideration and keep Sambucol top of mind for immune support.
- Consumers were nearly 144% more likely to select Sambucol if they had interacted with the KERV’d video assets than if they had never been exposed at all, exceeding KERV’s lift benchmark (2%) by +7100%
- Even further, the targeted demographic audience was 135% more likely to select Sambucol if they had interacted with the KERV’d video asset, as opposed to consumers who had simply been exposed, exceeding KERV’s lift benchmark by +6650%
By changing the passive standard pre-roll experience into an interactive one, KERV was able to provide a significant lift at the various stages of the targeted consumers’ purchase consideration journey during a pivotal time of year for the Sambucol brand.
Read more about how Sambucol transformed passive videos into active encounters.
I spent part of the week speaking to experts in OTT advertising, and frankly I was amazed how much this has grown in the last two years. OTT advertising is an internet-based, non-skippable, immersive, video-on-demand content format that allows advertisers to engage with a unique audience that is committed to the content it is consuming.
OTT stands for Over-the-Top-Television, which originally referred to the devices that go “over” a cable box to provide the user access to TV content such as Roku or AppleTV.
OTT ads are considered the same as CTV advertising because OTT just refers to a larger platform. “CTV” or Connected TV means a television set connected to the internet. In comparison, OTT programming can be played on Connected TVs, but can also be streamed via mobile devices, tablets, or desktops.
OTT ads allow for superior targeting, much more so than linear television ads. Linear television ads are network and cable TV commercials. Linear TV spot pricing options are set at a premium. In comparison, OTT advertising is often available through auctions with a set budget determining the ideal placement. Advertisers can know ahead of time the exact audiences who will be viewing their ads.
Much like with original TV advertising, companies can purchase over-the-top advertising via a guaranteed media buy or real-time programmatic bidding. A guaranteed media buy offers the advertiser fixed pricing and impression numbers based on the audience reach and ad frequency.
We spoke briefly with Gary Mittman of Kerv Interactive about what is going on in the industry.
What’s the coolest thing about OTT advertising?
IN the OTT / CTV space it is offering the opportunity to think outside the box of traditional interstitial/interruptive TV ads. We are in an environment where the content owners can create formats and concepts that can provide the viewer a user curated experience and give the advertiser an optin user with true intent.
How did the Pandemic Affect OTT Advertising?
With the advent of people being stuck at home and the expanding of the streaming channels we have begun to see subscription fatigue. Consumers are getting entertainment and content from multiple sources. This includes Social, OTT, CTV, Broadcast, Internet Streamers etc. This has caused networks like Netflix to see a decline in subscribers. As we have seen in the press they are now talking about AVOD or ad driven free content. We are at a convergence point of consumers trained to enjoy ad free content and the networks needing to supplement with alternative and creative methods while keeping the viewers interested.
What type of first party data is being used to track?
In the CTV space it is a data driven process, in the OTT space the networks have the user viewing preference data. The question is can the registration data be used for other applications and maintain privacy boundaries.
What is a great way to target locally?
With CTV it is a standard process, but with the OTT networks they have detail on where the user is and can target the ad opportunities with the residence details. IF the user is on a digital device away from that location you have the IP address for now that can assist but there is question if that is going away in the future.
What is KERV offering that is different?
KERV provides a real-time visual analysis with sophisticated AI to understand, like the natural eye, what the viewer is seeing, this is converted into visual metadata and or contextual relevance. WIth these data points KERV can provide a few paths of advertising applications; 1. Contextual data for programmatic relevant ad buys, 2. Creating object specific interactive experiences across all platforms and devices with our Automated ad creation platform. We are thinking out of the box to generate new and interactive experiences for both content and advertising alike.
