Celebrating 10 Years of Innovation at Vidmob

Celebrating 10 Years of Innovation at Vidmob

Ten years ago today, Vidmob was incorporated in the state of Delaware. While that marks the official legal start of the journey, the reality is that a lot of thought had already gone into how the world was changing, the need this created in the market, and of course, really important stuff like logos and color palettes. Needless to say, we didn’t get a lot of things right from the start.

(First visual embodiment of Vidmob, credit to Scott Brittingham from Pull Music)

But we were right about a number of big themes that have served as a lighthouse guiding us as the business has evolved over the past decade. First, we knew that the media formats through which the businesses of the world advertise were going to get increasingly complex, with the transition from text and images to video being just the beginning. Second, we knew that ad creative was really important for success. And third, we believed that missions mattered. 

So we got to work. In early 2015, we hired our first employees—an incredible group of multitalented individuals—and started building. Exactly what we are building has evolved a ton over the years, but not in the way most people think. There was never a pivot. Rather, I think of it more like pulling on a loose thread in a sweater. We listened intently to the signals from the market. We watched where things were going, always with a close eye on how to position our technology to deliver maximum benefit to our customers. And like the great Wayne Gretzky, we always tried to skate to where the puck was going. 

The Early Days

Initially, this meant building a two-sided marketplace, connecting businesses who needed more performant content to a network of amazing designers, all industry-specific experts who were trained to produce platform-specific content. This was much needed, and we quickly partnered with all of the major ad platforms (eg. Meta, Google, Snap, TikTok, Amazon, LinkedIn, etc.), all of whom knew that when marketers had better performing creative, they tended to increase their media spend on the channels where things were working. As more and more platforms introduced us to more and more brands, we saw a way to expand our value—building workflow software to help manage the whole creative process, from brief building to media management to review and approval of drafts to distribution of the finished creative.  

So we pulled on the loose thread and kept building. 

As our platform took shape, the scope of the work that our clients were doing on Vidmob grew. Soon they were making hundreds (in some cases thousands) of pieces of creative, and this gave rise to a new challenge: how to get that creative to the places where their media agencies would put budget behind it. So we started integrating into the platforms’ ads APIs to make distribution of the finished work a single-click affair. And when we did this, all of a sudden, we could see performance data for the content we were involved with. This was early 2017, and this is where the seeds of today’s Vidmob were born. We became obsessed with how the industry seemed misstructured. How could creative and media be separated nearly everywhere in the industry? How could media agencies have little control over the content they were given and put budget against, especially when they were responsible for hitting goals based on that content? How could creative agencies never get any signal letting them know whether the tactical decisions they made daily helped or hurt results? And most of all, in an industry where everyone agrees creative is at least 47% responsible for business results, how could nearly every single company on the LUMAscape be on the media side of the ledger?

So we pulled on the loose thread a little more, this time with the help of the early seeds of AI.

The Joining of Creative and Data

By late 2017, we knew this was our future. We started expanding our software to use then-nascent AI to be able to unpack creative decisions inside every one of our customers ads, and then compare that “creative decision information” to the performance data. We called it creative intelligence. We called it creative analytics. We called it a lot of things that the world had never heard of, but many of those terms we made up back then are now used throughout the industry. 

By early 2020, we recognized that the true power of AI lies not just in creating content but in understanding it. We saw immediately the connection we could make to performance and unlock the ability to further enhance creativity. Marketers could take “insights-to-action” by seeing creative elements’ and their impact on performance and optimize campaign creative all on our platform within days. This was the dawn of Intelligent Creative, and is what lies behind the hundreds of case studies we’ve published with clients showing campaign performance tens to hundreds of percent better than their previous, unintelligent creative. 

On we pulled.

Designing Systems for Unique Data

We quickly realized that by bringing performance data into creative conversations, we were doing more than just understanding creative. We were bringing together teams that were historically siloed. We weren’t diluting creativity with data, but using data to empower creativity. How those people in the content supply chain respond to that data wasn’t friction; it was gold. After all, it had already been proven that the best AI models were not pre-trained or supervised, but used reinforcement learning with human feedback. We recognized that our software enabled brands to tap into this reinforcement learning for creativity to refine their own models. In this technical and operational architecture, AI and human creativity were not adversarial, but rather, necessary complements, helping us improve the creative effectiveness of the world’s top marketers across walled gardens, the open web, retail media, and connected television. Vidmob was here to “Reinforce Creativity for Effectiveness.”

Closing in on the present, it’s now clear that AI will be central to the success of every marketer.  AI will be heavily used throughout the content supply chain, from planning to production to media decisioning to measurement. There is no question about this. But there are many questions about how one marketer will outcompete another for the same customers — in a time of increased noise and distraction — when everyone is using the same tools. After all, if everyone is using (pick a tool, say, Sora), then it cannot logically be an advantage for any one of those marketers. This fact was recently highlighted by a Google exec in a conversation with me when he said that their media decision AI has gotten so good that there is no longer any media strategy advantage left for any marketer. In his perspective, the only way to outcompete the competition now was through creative. 

This is the final pull of the thread (at least as of today’s 10-year anniversary).

Focusing on Creative Data

AI performance is driven by 3 things; (i) compute (think Nvidia), (ii) algorithms (think OpenAI), and (iii) data. For marketers, their opportunity to improve marketing effectiveness, and through this win, lies through door three: building a world-class, first-party creative data asset that will power differentiated results from all of the AI throughout their content supply chain. Everything we have done, built, and learned over the past decade has prepared us for this moment, where we are the leaders in a powerful new category that we helped create — creative data platforms. We are The Creative Data Company. And our job in the world is to help marketers build their own first-party creative data asset, and then instrument that across their content supply chain so that they and their agencies can drive the most effective marketing possible. 

The marketing world is becoming increasingly complex, with less direct tracking and more content being created, distributed, and consumed than ever before. In this environment, data-driven creativity and content isn’t just a nice-to-have; it’s a must-have. In a world where marketers have the tools to make anything they want, it is absolutely necessary to know what to make. By harnessing the power of creative data, we’re enabling brands to navigate this complexity with precision, ensuring their messages resonate with the right audiences in the most effective ways.

But this evolution wouldn’t have been possible without the collective efforts of our incredible team, partners, and investors. Together, we’ve built something truly special—a platform that not only meets the demands of today’s marketers but also forms an extensible foundation for the next decade of even greater innovation.

Learning from Our Mistakes

No journey is without its bumps, and ours has been no exception. We’ve faced challenges, made mistakes, and experienced setbacks. But each of these moments has been a learning opportunity, a chance to refine our approach and come back stronger. It’s this resilience that has allowed us to grow, innovate, and deliver ever-greater value to our clients and stakeholders.

We’re deeply thankful to everyone who has been part of this journey—our dedicated employees, visionary partners, and supportive investors. Your contributions have been instrumental in shaping Vidmob into the company it is today, and we couldn’t have done it without you.

Looking Ahead

As we look to the future, we’re more committed than ever to pushing the boundaries of what’s possible with creative data. The next decade promises even more exciting developments, and I’m eager to continue this journey with all of you.

Thank you for believing in our vision, for your hard work, and for your unwavering support. Here’s to the next 10 years of innovation, growth, and success—together.