Tech Talk: Saban and Disney invest in Playbuzz

The popularity of Playbuzz’s content is skyrocketing.

By ARIEL SHAPIRA
Playbuzz founder Shaul Olmert (photo credit: Courtesy)
Playbuzz founder Shaul Olmert
(photo credit: Courtesy)
 Playbuzz, the world’s leading creator of online platforms for quizzes, polls, games and trivia that can be shared through social media, recently announced that it has raised $15 million in new funding, led by Saban Ventures and with participation from The Walt Disney Company.
Its existing investors – 83North, Carmel Ventures and FirstTime Ventures – also partook in the investment round. In a previous round of funding in March 2015, Playbuzz raised $16m.
Playbuzz plans to use this additional funding to enhance its interactive content platform to expand its sponsored content business, which is already engaged with many leading global brands to create and distribute local advertising campaigns.
In addition, Playbuzz plans to continue the expansion of its R&D team.
“Playbuzz enables publishers and brands to create content that matches today’s content-consumption habits, while generating meaningful engagement and new monetization opportunities,” Playbuzz cofounder and CEO Shaul Olmert said. “The support of global leaders in media, such as Saban and Disney, will enable us to expand both our editorial reach and sponsored-content business.”
Playbuzz helps publishers, brands and content creators create and distribute content format that optimizes audience engagement and social dissemination, including slide shows, flip cards, galleries, surveys, lists and short video clips.
The popularity of Playbuzz’s content is skyrocketing.
While most similar types of content, such as full-length video clips, on the Internet are growing, video views driven by Playbuzz have a completion rate of 94 percent and a sharing rate of 15%.
“Engaging content is the key to media consumption,” Saban Ventures managing partner Barak Pridor said. “Playbuzz has positioned itself as the leading platform for media companies and brands to create and distribute such content across all devices. Playbuzz’s unique network and distributed sponsored-content offering make it the ideal platform for editorial and commercial growth of its partners.”
Playbuzz was founded by Olmert and Tom Pachys in 2012. It employs 100 people in its offices in Tel Aviv, New York, London, Hamburg and Nashville.
Clicktale wins Adobe award Clicktale, the leading digital customer-experience platform, has won the Adobe 2015 Marketing Cloud Innovation Partner of the Year, Americas Award, in recognition of its deep integrations and customer success stories. The award was presented to the company a few weeks ago by Matt Thompson, the executive vice president of Worldwide Field Operations, during Partner Day at the Adobe Summit in Las Vegas.
“It’s a great honor for Clicktale to be named Adobe’s most innovative partner,” Clicktale founder and CEO Tal Schwartz said. “Visualizing customer behavior has always been at the heart of what we do, and our bidirectional Adobe integrations enable brands to analyze underperforming segments, fix leaky conversion funnels and increase customer loyalty and lifetime value, to name a few examples.”
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