Incubator reveals marketing and media startups Snooper, Flobox and StartVR
A marketing service that promises to increase Facebook marketing performance by over 50%, a virtual reality company that promises to be ‘Netflix of VR’ and a mystery shopping app that pays people to try beer have been revealed in the latest group of Muru-D startups.
The Telstra-run startup program showcased its latest batch of entrants in Sydney with a number of marketing and media focused new businesses.
Snooper Mystery Shopping app founders Romain Stas de Richelle and Laurie Wespes
Snooper is a crowdsourcing app which pays shoppers to collect in-store data and share their consumer experience with brands in real time.
“Snooper is crowdsourcing platform of brands and retailers, we pay shoppers to collect in store data, share their experience with brands in real time via our app,” co-founder Laurie Wespes told Mumbrella.
The app pays shoppers for carrying out small missions such as taking pictures of supermarket shelves while doing their grocery shopping.
“Snooper came from our frustration in the business world,” Wespes said. “Rom, my co-founder, was a marketing manager at L’Oreal and he tried to build beautiful marketing strategies that were never implemented in store and I was a consultant at Bain & Company advising brands on their growth strategy and I realised strategy means nothing without execution.”
Brands such as Heineken, Frucor and Caltex are working with Snooper which launched six months ago and now boasts 5,000 ‘snoopers’.
One of Snooper’s current campaigns is with Heineken where users can earn $14 by checking their beer is being served properly.
Flobox co-founder Steve Lui
Marketing platform Flobox promises to make online ad campaign planning easier to manage than a spreadsheet while, the founders claim, increasing the ROI on Facebook advertising by 51%.
“We had a really limited marketing budget of $2500 spent on Facebook ads. It was our main acquisition channel for our B2C app play,” co-founder Steve Liu told Mumbrella. “We spent most of our days exporting data from Facebook into Excel spreadsheets then playing with pivot tables to get insights for better performance.”
The company was founded two months ago by four former UNSW students and already boasts ten clients. “We use machine learning. Roughly a thousand dollars of ad spend gets us ten thousand data points so we crunch through that to find the best audience.”
StartVR Founders: Kain Tietzel, Martin Taylor, Nathan Anderson, Jaeger Battersby and Christopher Eddison-Cogan.
Being the “Netflix for VR” is a big promise from the StartVR team which boasts an older group of founders with a range of media and production experience.
The company was founded in October 2015 and already claims brands like Qantas and Lion as clients. Start VR offers interactive cinematic quality virtual reality experiences with the company both producing content and licensing its distribution platform.
“It came about because we saw what we were doing in the market was similar to what Netflix and other media companies were building with content,” chief operating officer Nathan Anderson told Mumbrella. “I think VR at the moment requires people to think about how they are going to get their content out to people.”
“For Qantas for example we make VR content for them but we’ve also licensed our platform to them. We have ten different clients who’ve licensed our software who use it to publish VR content out.
“Marketers like Qantas are using it in a few different strategies, one is experiential where they might use it at an event. Other ways might be like the Sydney Opera House where we made some content from one of their shows and they used that content for Facebook360. 360 content on the web is getting a lot more cut through.”
“VR gives you a better sense of what it’s like to be there more than any other medium so it’s not just marketing but it’s lots of other uses brands are seeing value.
“We’re like cinema in the early Twentieth Century,” Anderson concludes. “We’re exploring what can and can’t be done. We’re not going to work it out overnight, but it’s great to be part of that.”
