The Ledger
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AdGreetz recruited the CTO who built competitor Spirable's entire tech stack
“A company called Spirable, and I needed another, you know, very muscular executive in addition to our CTO. He had built their entire stack. He had built them from the ground up.”
Frankel claims AdGreetz's enterprise cold call conversion rate reached 62%
“We've gone from kid get away from me. You bother me into a probably 62% of the cold calls that we make turning into people saying, yes, I'd like to know more versus five percent.”
Frankel: Steve Jobs bullied weak people but respected confident thinkers
“If you were weak or not that smart, he would probably bully and go after you. If you had good ideas and spoke your mind and weren't insecure, he respected you and was quite nice.”
AdGreetz automates 25,000 video ad variations in under 36 hours
“And what we've done over eight years is take that incredibly robust process and figured out how to get it done, you know, in a day or a day and a half for something as bespoke as that.”
AdGreetz generated 300,000 video variations for P&G's first hyper-personalized campaign
“We're in the middle of doing, ah, P&G's first hyper-personalized campaign ever. They typically make one commercial. We've got 300,000 versions. So we call out 224 cities, towns, and villages.”
Frankel: 2% of brands use personalized video, while 84% call it the future
“This is still a business that about two percent of brands are playing in. Although 84% say it's the future.”
Frankel predicts AdGreetz will reach profitability by November 2020
“No, we will be profitable in about 60 days”
AdGreetz raised $10M pre-revenue at a $16M valuation in 2012
“Well, that was pre-revenue, and off the top of my head, because it's already about six years ago, we raised ten million at, I don't know, sixteen million dollar valuation.”
Frankel: Personalized video ads will mirror video-on-demand adoption curve
“Nathan, I helped invent video on demand, and I spent 10 years knocking on the doors of all of the cable and satellite executives, and for nine years, they would say, what are you talking about? Nathan's happy to watch NCIS tonight at nine o'clock, and we said,…”
Frankel: New products evolve much slower than entrepreneurs expect
“I have a history of seeing how new products evolve, and the answer is they evolve a lot less quickly than the entrepreneur behind them Would like in most cases.”
Frankel witnessed Steve Jobs verbally berating his Warner Brothers colleagues
“When he did come to Warner Brothers, I did see him beat up a number of my colleagues.”
AdGreetz Deploys Video Ads Across 100 US Streaming Channels
“Well, we deploy to 26 channels, which are Facebook and Google and email and app and everything that people have been doing for a while. But the latest twist is in the US, we're now doing this on a hundred streaming channels.”
Frankel: Synthetic lip sync technology is still too fuzzy for TV ads
“It wouldn't be lips being augmented. Typically because that technology is still a little fuzzy.”
Frankel says AdGreetz has raised $12M and is now profitable
“So I think we're up to twelve million, but no, we're breaking even and making money now.”
Frankel: AdGreetz Facilitates About $50M in Annual Media Spend
“So I would say that today we're probably at about fifty million dollars worth of media.”
Frankel: Australian broadcaster Nine has 600 reps selling AdGreetz
“So there's a broadcaster called nine in Australia. They're the NBC call it of Australia. So they now have 600 people out selling our product and they're bringing in their first clients because this is a three month old or two month old relationship.”
Frankel predicts AdGreetz will generate close to $10M in 2022 revenue
“We're going to do, we'll do close to ten million with, you know, with 20 plus clients.”
A typical AdGreetz enterprise client pays $396,000 annually
“Well, a typical is approximately 33,000 dollars a month, which gets up to 396,000 a year.”
Frankel: AdGreetz boosted Tanishq CTR 4.6x and watch duration 12.6x
“We increased their click-through rate 4.6 times, which is big. We increase people watching 12.6 times longer. And that was a year ago. They caught their breath. They've come back and given us a 12 month order.”
AdGreetz generated $5 million in software revenue over the preceding 12 months
“How much of the ten million is media spend is about half. So it's about five, five million in cash and a percentage of the other five.”
Frankel: AdGreetz takes a 2% to 5% cut on media buying spend
“Media buying is in the two, three, four, five percent of the other number depending on what the brand is.”
Former Warner Bros president says flattering bosses helps maintain corporate roles
“Probably maybe to kiss a little bit more butt. Because then you don't especially when I did 30 years of corporate life as president of Warner Brothers because it's easy to bend people out of shape, and it might be better to kiss some butt and continue to be an…”
Brands pay AdGreetz low tens of thousands monthly for personalized video
“Brands pay us tens of thousands of dollars a month in the low tens of thousands of dollars a month to take their advertising from what we call one size fits all that doesn't really fit anyone to hundreds of thousands or millions of unique versions”
AdGreetz built a campaign for Nissan with six billion possible versions
“We just did one last week for Nissan. They have a mailing list of hundreds of thousands of customers, which of the 13 model Nissan's over which of the 10 years they own. So we're talking to you about your 2013 Rogue or Altima. We know you're in Toronto. We kno…”
AdGreetz has served approximately 80 Fortune 500 brands
“We've done this for about 80, you know, fortune 500 brands all around the world, all different languages.”
AdGreetz generated $2M in 2017 revenue, doubling annually since 2015
“No, we're talking about literally a couple, two, two million in 2017, half of that in 2016, half of that in 2015”
Eric Frankel personally invested $2M and raised $8M for AdGreetz
“So, you know, I put in about two million bucks and we raised another eight million from some terrific, smart well-known executives from around the US.”
Eric Frankel retains slightly less than a 33% stake in AdGreetz
“We sold, yes, I own about, I own a little less than a third of the company.”
AdGreetz serves roughly 10 active customers monthly, including six annual contracts
“So we do about 10 in any month and about six full-time you know year-long contracts with more coming on regularly.”
Frankel turned down Steve Jobs's Pixar job offer over limited scope
“Well, I was under contract at Warner Brothers at the time, and I said, I can't have this conversation with you, or if they found out, they could let me go, and I'd be out of a job, but it was actually going to work at Pixar, and at Warner Brothers, I had 7000 …”
Frankel says AdGreetz probably won't sell until revenue quadruples
“But I don't think we'll probably sell until we, you know, probably quadruple the revenue.”
Frankel recommends Rebump as a cost-effective sales follow-up tool
“The simplest, least expensive thing I've ever wandered upon. Rebump. Have you heard of it? ... We found a tool. I'm making it up, but I think it's 15 dollars a month, and it does the best job. And the percentage of, yes, I'd like to meet with you through this …”