Matt Cutler, VP of Marketing and Analytics at Visible Measures.
Thomas Owadenko: When did your company launch and where is it located?
Matt Cutler: Headquartered in Boston, Visible Measures officially raised the curtain on the company and our new product, VisibleSuite, at DEMO 08 in January. As part of this launch, Visible Measures introduced the industry’s first Internet video audience behavior measurement suite.
TO: Why did you launch it and what is your mission?
MC: While competition for online viewers is fierce and growing fiercer, confusion persists around how publishers, advertisers, and Internet video sites track, measure, and analyze audience behavior patterns. Many companies are competing to capture the attention of Internet video viewers but publishers and advertisers lacked a means to quantitatively measure audience engagement. Our solution: Internet video requires a new set of metrics to understand audience behaviors and more accurately predict and analyze the success of Internet videos.
TO: What is the strength of your products?
MC: With our product, it is now possible to capture and measure every video interaction in every video from every viewer, from play to pause to rewind to forward-to-a-friend and more. VisibleSuite provides high-value, high-impact solutions to the audience valuation and content monetization challenge. Built from the ground up to measure Internet video, VisibleSuite audience behavior measurement solutions provide video publishers and advertisers with precise performance data including how audiences find, view, interact with, and share each video. This allows publishers to make data-driven management decisions about their content portfolios, distribution strategies, and audience targeting. Advertisers can know not just that their placement was viewed, but how much the audience was involved in the message and then map results to specific campaigns.
To add capabilities in viral video distribution and analytics services, we also recently acquired Vidmeter, an Internet video distribution and analytics company that manages universal upload, syndicated tracking and rankings of user-generated video content.
TO: How many people work in your company?
MC: We have offices in Boston and the Bay area, and employ about 25 people.
TO: Who are your clients?
MC: Partners and early adopters include:
- Boston.com
- Brightcove
- DEMO
- Funny or Die
- Hill Holliday
- HoneyShed/Droga5
- Streefire.net
TO: Why did they choose you?
MC: We are the only solution on the market today that allows video publishers to make data-driven management decisions about their content portfolios, distribution strategies, and audience targeting. As they look to grow their total audience while increasing viewing time and viewer involvement, Internet video publishers can now use our technology to understand exactly how their online audiences engage with their video content.
And, with VisibleSuite’s ability to measure the behavior of their Internet video audiences, video advertisers can know not just that their placement was viewed, but how much the audience was involved in the message and then map results to specific campaigns.
TO: Who are your competitors?
MC: No direct competitors.
TO: SEO and Video? Myth or reality?
MC: Reality. As video becomes a larger and larger percentage of the content available on the Web, effective video search will become an important aspect of the general user experience. And as the audience discovers more and more videos via search, video SEO will likely emerge as an important aspect of marketing video content.
TO: What do you think about google universal and how it should be?
MC: Google Universal shows promise though is in the early stages of its maturation cycle. We support any approach that makes it easier for Internet video audiences to find content that they are interested in and they will find engaging.
TO: Did you raise money? How much and who invested or do you plan to raise?
MC: We recently closed a $13.5 million series B round of financing. The round was led by MDV-Mohr Davidow Ventures with participation from General Catalyst Partners, the lead investor in the company’s Series A Funding announced in early 2007. The company plans to use the additional funding to fuel expansion and growth.
TO: What are the “top 3″ priorities for your company in the coming year ?
MC:
1) Continued research and development of our VisibleSuite and related product and service offerings.
2) Growth and expansion through customer acquisition
3) Market education and industry thought leadership around Internet video audience behavior measurement topics
