GumGum Launches EMEA Operations with London Office

Gumgum 2
GumGums tech overlays advertising imagery on editorial photos

GumGum, which describes itself as “the digital marketing platform for the visual web” has launched its EMEA operations with the opening of a London office.

The firm’s USP is in-image advertising technology which it says helps major brands shift their media buying toward more visual, native executions that are integrated into relevant content. In-image ads are powered by image recognition technology and are overlaid on editorial images, where a user’s attention is actively focused, with the aim of creating higher viewability and engagement. The GumGum platform reaches over 400m web users as they view images and content across more than 2,000 premium publishers.

“At GumGum we are dedicated to adding value to every connected image and to captivating consumers through engaging visuals,” said GumGum CEO and founder Ophir Tanz. “Over the last seven years, we’ve built a track record of success, driving brand lift, viewability and true engagement for top brands like L’Oreal, BMW and Disney, while building strong global partnerships with our agency partners. Expanding to the UK is a key step towards our objective of building a truly global platform for in-image advertising.”

GumGum recently raised £16.9m in Series C financing led by Morgan Stanley in order to accelerate its international expansion and strengthen R&D resources across image recognition and computer vision.

The London office is headed up by John Donovan, a 12-year digital sales and marketing veteran with stints at Vdopia and Sunday Times on his CV. He said: “The visual web is all around us, and is an increasingly important part of the consumer experience online. Studies have shown consumers interpret the meaning of images faster than words and that the number of images posted daily is growing exponentially and has reached 2bn. But few digital media platforms have been able to help marketers to take full advantage of the visual web, until now. We’ve already recruited a talented team here in the UK who will be responsible for educating the market of the benefits of in-image advertising, and replicating the success GumGum has seen in the US.”

GumGum promises 81 per cent viewability and 10x better engagement than regular ads for its ads. How intrusive people consider them when the editorial image they were looking at is temporarily replaced by an ad is, however, a moot point.