Out of the 5000 startups that applied to 500 startups next batch, Estonia’s ResultsOnAir tells us they were were one of the 30 to be selected into the San Francisco-based accelerator program, meaning they’re now starting summer a little early in sunny California.
ResultsOnAir solves a problem facing the “offline” world of TV – it’s hard to track the return on investment in advertising. The young startup has been operating for nine months and focuses on ads with call to action in them, such as telecoms, financial companies, payday loans, travel sites, gambling, you name it.
So far they’ve seen traction with advertisers in Estonia and the UK, as well as distributers in Finland, Japan and Brazil. With better tools in place for advertisers they want to shift the advertising market away from branding ads and into advertising with a more concrete impact and direct call to action.
The three founders are hard to keep track of, given their first names are Cristo, Kristel and Kristo, but Kristo Peterson explains that the root of the startup came from their time at a marketing agency where they saw that it was very easy to analyze and optimize Facebook and Google adword campaigns. “Even though we were using the best tools we still weren’t able to analyze tv campaigns,” he points out.
There are competitors out there, but rather than looking at focus groups to paint a bigger picture, ResultsOnAir uses a “unique attribution method” that compares ad air-times with specific real time traffic data. Thanks to this they can see which ads were most effective and measure the lifetime value of a click – if you saw one ad that drove you to a website, but you didn’t sign up until later, they can track that data back.
The team seems super excited to get started at 500 Startups however – the U.S. is a huge market when it comes to TV ad expenditures, and on top of the acceleration and funding from 500 Startups they’re excited to be in the right place to sell to U.S. corporations.
Estonia and 500 Startups have a tight bond; 500 Startups founder Dave McClure coined #EstonianMafia, the catch-all hashtag for the Estonian startup scene back in 2011, and Results on Air will be something like the fifth Estonian startup heading to the program. With their company name now on Garage48’s wall of startup fame, they’ll probably be hiring more Krist*s in the future.
