Company: Octaive
Founder: Sam Peters, Ben Swinburne & Anton Hanley, 2019
Website: https://www.octaive.com/
Business: A conversational media platform that empowers people to control their own ad experiences.
About Octaive
Octaive is a conversational media platform flipping the ‘push’ nature of digital advertising on its head by empowering people to control their own ad experiences. In doing so it gives brands a viable alternative to traditional personalised advertising which typically relies on personal data collection via cookies.
Since Google’s announcement on the deprecation of the cookie, demand for the privacy-first product has exploded as brands are now forced to look for viable alternatives to cookie-based personalised advertising which relies on collecting consumers’ data and retargeting them. The business is already profitable just two years after formation.
Founded in 2019, by Sam Peters, Ben Swinburne and Anton Hanley, CreaTech startup Octaive’s privacy-first technology replaces typical banner and video ads with 2-way chat style experiences where the consumer is in control. Brands can therefore achieve relevant advertising without relying on cookies while also capturing the ‘active attention’ of interested consumers instead of just a ‘click. As a result, clients are regularly seeing up to 400%+ better results than typical display advertising.
The 9 strong business has seen revenues more than double in the past year. They have recently won the backing of a series of high-profile angel investors including PHD founder David Pattison as Chairman, having raised £500k in their angel funding round. Their client list includes Vodafone, VW, Dell and PayPal.
Like with so many other businesses the pandemic was a huge hurdle to overcome. The business was just starting its investment round in March 2020 and they decided to postpone their investment plans and focus efforts internally to steer the business through the uncertainty. They refocused sales efforts away from Auto / travel, which had been Octaive’s biggest sectors, and targeted FMCG and Tech.
Coming through the pandemic, the team now feel stronger, particularly as the demand for privacy-first and attention based solutions has significantly increased. Having weathered the pandemic they are on a really sustainable footing, deliberately holding off a larger funding round despite strong interest in order to focus on iteratively enhancing their technology based on real client feedback to ensure solid market fit. They are now releasing new products into the market and scaling the US operations in 2022.
According to founder Sam Peters: “We believe by giving brands a privacy-first consumer-focused ad solution we will create a better internet for everyone. For too long brands have been limited to just ‘pushing’ their message at consumers without the ability to listen but today people expect control over their digital experiences. We help brands look past outdated metrics and create ads that generate active attention. Our platform makes this super simple by repurposing standard display, social and video assets into highly engaging, 2-way interactive conversational creative. This enables true privacy-first personalisation by giving the consumer the control to tailor the ad content themselves and they are therefore actively engaged.”
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