AdScanner, a Croatian startup developing data-driven TV advertising solutions, has secured a new investment worth €2.4 million through a joint investment from South Central Ventures, J&T Ventures, and business angel Matthias von Bechtolsheim.
Founded in 2012, the company has been disrupting the TV ad industry with its products and solutions during the past years, and isn’t planning to stop any time soon – having clients from media agencies, advertisers, and TV companies, to telecom operators across the region.
AdScanner, active on the markets in Croatia, Austria, Germany, Bulgaria, and Serbia, now plans to use its latest investment to scale its expansion and consolidate its presence in key markets, the company’s CEO and co-founder, Marin Curkovic tells The Recursive.
“We have just entered one of the largest European ad markets with Germany. With this latest investment round, we plan to scale our expansion to be able to onboard multiple large markets at once and also boost sales teams in the key markets, while also strengthening our core team and tech in Zagreb to follow the quickly increasing breadth and depth of data we process.” Curkovic explains.
The company’s products, such as the Cockpit solution which enable calculations and analytics in near real-time, aim to change the way the TV ecosystem works. And as Curkovic further states, the base for the disruption is big data.
“The disruption of TV has been one of the hottest topics in the ad industry. There are lots of overlapping buzzwords flying around: connected / advanced / converged / addressable TV. They all have one thing in common: the digitalization of how TV as a media and ad channel is being distributed, measured, planned and traded, in terms of ad space.” Curkovic tells The Recursive.
“Content and campaigns need to function on large-scale audience data and analytics. It’s not enough anymore to just track a few thousand households in a country and determine national TV audiences based on their behavior.” he says.
AdScanner’s approach identifies what’s being shown on TV via a video recognition algorithm, then gives campaigns and content audience metrics based on the company’s cooperations with telcos – who, as distributors, are the perfect sources for raw data at scale.
As the need for data-driven solutions to increase the effectiveness of TV advertising is growing, so do AdScanner’s plans when it comes to its future products. By 2023, the forecast is that television advertising revenue will exceed $177 billion worldwide.
“We work with their raw data, clean it, turn it into media and then offer the data and resulting actionable insights in our AdScanner Cockpit to advertisers, agencies, DSPs and broadcasters. Essentially, we are creating the biggest TV DMP based on telco and provider data.” Curkovic concludes.
