Brandzooka to grow employee base fivefold

BOULDER — Brandzooka, a media advertising platform, has announced its 2019 growth plans — including significant employee growth — and a new board member.

Juan Villalonga is joining existing board directors Alex Bogusky, Stephen Groth and Adam Edelman. Villalonga led growth stage investments at The Trade Desk and previously was executive chairman and CEO of Telefónica Group, where he brought the company’s market capitalization from $12 billion to over $100 billion.

“Juan joining the board is kind of a really big deal for us and for the Boulder market,” Brandzooka co-founder and CEO Aquiles La Grave told BizWest. “Juan is arguably the most successful investor working in media and ad tech today. He led Trade Desk, a giant in the space, from early growth-stage funding all the way through an IPO. Having a person of that caliber invest in ad tech in the Boulder market is news in and of itself. It’s a neat thing to see Boulder beginning to attract that level of talent.”

Brandzooka focuses on helping clients place targeted ads on primetime television, making it accessible to anyone.

The news of its new board member comes as Brandzooka executes plans to grow from 15 employees to 85 over the next few months. The company has already doubled its size in January.

“We started Brandzooka with a moonshot of making TV and digital programmatic ads accessible to anyone,” he said. “We hit on something special and have averaged 500 percent growth year-over-year since we founded in 2015.”

La Grave said now was the right time to grow its employees.

“When we started Brandzooka, we were at the right place and right time,” he said. “We forecasted in 2015 that the media landscape would change aggressively. We’re seeing the general population abandon linear TV as cable butting behavior becomes prevalent. As audiences shift, Brandzooka is in position at the right place to deliver a new experience and solution for advertisers and keep engaging those audiences.”

The company has released a new product to prove that they’re able to measure that audience engagement. Its first new product since founding, Adbrawl, is a new service released in partnership with Crispin Porter + Bogusky. Adbrawl allows anybody to upload a video and test it for creative marketing potential. Brandzooka takes that uploaded video, puts it on primetime TV and measures the audience reaction to that video in real time. Adbrawl uses Brandzooka’s proprietary algorithm measuring and gauging audience behavior, all as it’s happening.

Adbrawl isn’t being monetized, La Grave said. It’s free to use and the company is underwriting the cost of running the videos.

“What we’re hoping to do with Adbrawl is begin a conversation and bring awareness to the fact that new channels of advertising in connected TV generates a wealth of data,” he said. “In terms of how it’s placed, where it’s placed, the different behaviors of an audience that’s watching, there is real value of data and it’s all about what you do with it. Our IP is a high-functioning algorithm that parses through that data…. We’re delivering this value to advertisers because we feel extremely passionate about starting that conversation.”

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