Startup Adnimation is launching an ad network with a new approach to attracting the attention of online viewers.
As you can probably guess from the name (and, okay, from the fact that I pretty much spelled it out in the headline), the core of the company’s approach is animation, but it’s not trying to create normal animated ads. Instead, it layers animations on top of standard banners.
For example, founder and CEO Tomer Treves told me that if a cat food company was running an ad, Adnimation could show a cartoon of a cat jumping around the page, then drawing your attention back to the banner. The animation isn’t created by the advertiser, and instead comes from the library of animations that Adnimation has built up. That means advertisers can continue creating standard banners without spending the extra time or money on animation, yet hopefully still see increased engagement.
But from a consumer perspective, is this just another for ads to annoy you? Treves pointed out that there’s nothing here that’s deceiving users, and he suggested that the company’s fun animations mean that people will “come in with a smile.” (You can see a sample animation in the video below.)
He added that the animations work on both desktop and mobile, and when I asked about whether large brand advertisers would want to use animations that they hadn’t created themselves, Treves said, “For the very big brands, we make sure that our animations are very high end.”
Adnimation has raised an undisclosed, “very small pre-seed investment” from Israeli angel investors.