Dive Brief:
- AdYapper, a Techstars alum looking to reduce wasted dollars for digital advertisers, received $4.5 million in Series A investment.
- Its business model is based on an outsider’s view of the digital ad business.
- AdYapper’s founders argue that digital marketers are wasting millions on ads that are never delivered to an actual person.
Dive Insight:
Digital advertising is a space ripe for exploration, exploitation and certainly disruption. With a previous $1 million from angel investors, and a fresh $4.5 million Series A round of funding positions AdYapper, a Techstars accelerator program alum, as the latest venture poised to reduce waste and fraud for digital advertisers.
Elliot Hirsch, AdYapper CEO, told the Wall Street Journal, “We came at this with an outsider perspective on the ad industry, and looked at it through a completely different lens – a logical one. That’s simply something this industry isn’t used to. Our technology is designed to identify and remove non-working media from brands’ budgets.”
Recent research from the Association of National Advertisers found 11% of digital display ads involve fraud, and the problem could cost advertisers as much as $6 billion this year. Given the growing talk around ad fraud, Hirsch believes marketers at top brands are ready to listen.
AdYapper's founders say that digital marketers are wasting millions of their budgets on ads that are never seen by anything more than online bots, and their tech will help prevent bad ad buys as well as ensure ads are viewable across devices.
The problem as they see it? Digital advertisers chasing inexpensive high volume ad buys that consume budgets, but don’t deliver ads to a desired audience.
“The whole ecosystem rewards volume not value, and that leads to ad placements that have absolutely no business value,” he told WSJ.
