Photo Credit: PR
It’s the plot of a million movies and TV shows, from Grease to The New Guy. A nerdy teenager decides to transform themselves – so they change the way they dress and act and start moving with the cool crowd. If they hang around popular kids, their thinking goes, perhaps they will become popular too.
It’s this principle – that being around what’s popular and trendy will rub off – that is Taykey’s secret to success.
The advertising platform, which grew 600% in the last two years, has just announced that it raised $15 million in new funding. The funders include Innovation Endeavors, Eric Schmidt’s venture arm, and existing Taykey investors SoftBank Capital, Sequoia Capital, Marker LLC, and Tenaya Capital. To date, the company has raised a total of $32 million in five funding rounds.
Most advertisers know instinctively that it pays to be next to what’s popular. Witness the phenomenal prices paid for commercial slots during the Super Bowl.
But Taykey takes this principle one step further. Instead of planning ahead for what is likely to be popular, say the Super Bowl, or the release of Apple’s latest gadget, advertisers can use Taykey’s platform to react to online trends in real-time. This is even better, according to the company, because most trends are unpredictable.
Photo Credit: PR
As Taykey’s CEO and Co-Founder Amit Avner explains it, “people were more likely to click on a food and beverage ad [in 2014] when it was displayed near content about Oculus Rift or Apple Pay, over something about Lay’s new Wasabi Ginger flavor or David Guetta’s MUMMS champagne partnership. While it may seem counter-intuitive, technology brings eyeballs to even the most unrelated campaigns.”
In other words, people clicked on ads when they were displayed next to trendy topics, even if those topics were unrelated.
At the same time, says Avner, these trends are unpredictable and constantly shifting. For instance, Apple’s iPhone 6 may have been the biggest event of the third quarter of 2014, but Nokia and HTC trends performed two to three times better for advertisers than did the iPhone 6.
Pivoting into marketing
Taykey, which tracks trending topics on social media and throughout the Internet 24/7 and then places clients’ ads next to them, is using its new infusion of cash to expand its platform from advertising to marketing.
Although there is much overlap between advertising and marketing, marketing generally refers to the bigger picture strategy of how to promote a product – of which advertising is a single component.
“Taykey’s vision is to help brands create ‘prime time’ opportunities online by targeting their ads against what’s most popular for target audiences, at any given moment,” said Avner in a statement. “As we have progressed, we have learned that these trends have applications far beyond advertising. Understanding the trends that your target audience is following can inform everything from social media strategy to product design. The new Taykey marketing platform is a natural evolution of our existing solution, allowing brands to apply trends-based insights throughout their businesses.”
Taykey has worked with Fortune 500 brands like AT&T, Verizon, Proctor & Gamble, Disney, Marriott, MasterCard, Microsoft, Google, Starbucks and Toyota. Today, seven out of 10 of the top advertisers in the U.S., as defined byAdvertising Age, are Taykey clients. Amit Avner, Taykey’s CEO, was also listed as one of Forbes’s “30 under 30” for 2014.
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