Covatic empowers media companies to leverage user context data

by Startacus Admin

Covatic - Tailored advertising in an entirely innovative way, thanks to this startup that helps media companies to leverage user context data without exposing personal data...

Making money with online advertising is not as simple as it used to be. Ad blocker plugins for your browser prevent adverts from displaying, so websites refuse users access when they have these ad blockers active, so users avoid those websites until the ad blocker developer upgrades the software to block the block blocker.

Even when users do see adverts, they are often not relevant to them, or they simply display products they have already looked at and either bought or dismissed. So, online advertising is going to have to step up its game and become more relevant and less obnoxious.

Birmingham-based Covatic has developed a platform to help with this. Their platform, Serendipity, is not just beneficial to advertisers, however - it helps the user consume just the right kind of media they enjoy, in the right amounts, at the right times.

Serendipity learns what you like - be it spy films, romance novels, and breaking news or football, coin collection documentaries, and cooking recipes - it learns when you consume these things, and it learns what else you are doing when you do so.

If you like to watch an episode of The Simpsons every morning on your 20-minute train journey, Serendipity will learn this and have it pre-loaded to your device. By learning the when, where, and what, the platform can further tailor the media it offers you by its length, ensuring that it doesn’t give you a 2-hour movie to watch in your 30-minute lunch break.

The data that Serendipity collects from you and learns about you is passed on to the broadcasters to help them tailor their service and learn about their consumers. Vitally, this information is entirely anonymous. They see commute patterns, media consumption habits, activities, points of interest regularly passed, etc., but all of the information about who these things come from stays securely on your device.

In early October, Covatic raised £850,000 in an investment round led by the Midlands Engine Investment Fund, bringing their total investment raised to more than £1.6m. This will allow the startup to bring in more talent to further improve their platform, and to expand its market.

In our busy, online world, this kind of tailored advertising and media offering is inevitable, so a startup that provides a service that not only benefits consumer as well as broadcaster, but also does so without privacy invasion and selling of personal data is one that is ahead of the game and that we think will set the standard.


If you like the sound of this startup, you might also want to read up on:

Bidooh takes it's facial analysis digital billboard advertising to South Korea

Greendeck - competitive retail intelligence using AI

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• #advertising
• #media
• #personal data
• #covatic
• #advertisers
• #tv

Published on: 10th November 2018