Achieving incredible engagement rates with Voice Advertising and Startup Cashew!

Voice is huge and rising fast. Almost 4.2 billion voice-activated assistants were used in devices around the world last year. The global voice assistant market is expected to reach a market value of USD 7.3 million by 2025 and by 2023 an estimate of 8 billion voice-enabled assistants will be in use. 

The growing popularity of smart speakers like Amazon Alexa and Google Home gives businesses the opportunity to use interactive audio content to connect with their communities and audiences in an entirely new, and more engaging way.

Interactivity gives a new perspective on advertising: these ads speak directly to listeners and invite them to respond. From interruption to invitation. The ads can offer helpful information, a recipe, a promo code, exclusive content or to set a reminder, while allowing the user to decline. Good voice ads can become an experience: think of a voice led destination discovery tour or a conversation about the features of a car, similar to a showroom setting.

Achieving higher engagement rates is what all brands are after, but only a few add voice experiences to their customer journey today. Why? Because there is little knowledge and expertise around designing, producing, and distributing voice experiences. 

This is where our portfolio startup Cashew comes in. Cashew is a unique voice curation platform that gives brands everything they need to build, deploy, measure, and manage voice experiences customers love. 

The Cashew team already worked with noteworthy brands like Sony, Disney, Ikea, and Tripadvisor. For Sony they created an interactive ad that realised a smashing engagement rate of 28%. Overall, Cashew’s voice ads outperform digital ads 3:1. That’s why we are convinced that more brands will soon discover this new channel and that Cashew will continue its growth at a fast pace.

Diageo launches Gladcloud powered social media marketing tool for pubs

GladCloud offers solutions for local businesses, empowering them in such a way that they can be the most effective catalyst for large brands by engaging local audiences. This results in up to 4x more cost-effective, locally-relevant social media advertising. 

GladCloud also develops creative and campaign management tools, account management tools and infrastructure solutions for digital customer marketing and digital marketing. 

They now partnered with Diageo, the global leader in beverage alcohol with an outstanding brand collection including Baileys, Tanqueray, and Captain Morgan. 

For Diageo specifically, the startup developed the enterprise advocacy marketing platform “Social Zone”, which allows local pubs and bars in multiple markets to choose from a big array of high quality, editable assets of social media content. The local outlet can then customize the content by - for example - including their own logo. This database is refreshed monthly and even includes content for specific time periods. 

Additionally, the platform gives access to online review management tools and gives opportunity to communicate with the social media following in an seamless and effective way. All of this is offered for free to local pubs and bars.

After being closed for so long, engaging with the crowd and offering an inviting social media presence, helps pubs and bars to have a successful re-opening period. 

We are happy to see GladCloud’s work and impact on so many local businesses who are finally opening up again and are excited about their future projects!

Turning e-commerce into vibrant communities - our startup Vurdere

Vurdere, the startup that turns e-commerce into vibrant communities, is the next startup that we will be introducing. As a startup in e-commerce with an already validated product, looking to expand to the european market, they were a perfect match for the Collider 2.0 programme. Read on to find out more about their product, their successes, the team, and their visions for the future! We will also elaborate on how exactly they are creating those online communities in e-commerce and how the crackteam’s support is accelerating them to the next level of their journey! 

For a long time, researchers have suggested that shopping enjoyment results from the proximity to other people. Also, customers tend to be more excited when they try, for example, a new restaurant because it is popular with diners they found interesting. Most e-commerce stores do not make use of these effects and the power of social communities, so Vurdere developed their product Vurdere Social+ Suite, a SAAS solution installed on webstores, that creates interaction between people that have a similar social profile while they are shopping online. This leads to more meaningful, personalized, and relevant content to help shoppers decide what to buy, while simultaneously building more trust. Vurdere connects people's social profiles to their ratings and reviews. Shoppers see rich, meaningful product opinions from those most like them, increasing likelihood to buy, and engagement overall. 

By harnessing the power of social communities in e-commerce, increasing conversion rates up to 3 times, it is no surprise that Vurdere already has a strong portfolio of customers in South America. Their product has been tested extensively with millions of people and the results are amazing. The team knows that Vurdere Social+ Suite can deliver what it promises. 

Who is the team behind Vurdere?

Vurdere has the Brazilian DNA with all of the 4 founders being from Brazil. Jaime, the CEO, is the original founder and the one who started the company. As a brilliant Product Manager he built the cornerstones to scale Vurdere. Julio, the Front-End specialist, is responsible to deliver the best interface - clear and sharp for the customers. Raul is the Back-End engineer and manages the core coding, which Vurdere’s product is accessing to create the “social effect”. Last but not least, Daniel is the Growth specialist, bringing in new customers, partners, and markets. 

We asked the four of them on why they joined Collider, and how the crackteam has been adding value to their journey in this programme so far, but we also wanted to know what their goals and plans for the future are. We were excited when we heard that “Collider is the best accelerator for Martechs in the Netherlands and the crackteam offers a hands-on, dive-in approach which is different from what other accelerators do. The crackteam has dove into our business as part of the team, has been pushing us forward and got us to think bigger! With their experience from past endeavors, their know-how and their connections, we were able to take it to the next level in our process of growing Vurdere. 

For the future, our vision is to deliver the same astonishing results to customers globally, using the Netherlands as our HQ.” 

We are delighted to be a part of Vurdere’s journey and are certain that soon enough we will see more and more e-commerce stores turn into vibrant communities. 

https://www.vurdere.com/en

Turff - a brilliant combination of FinTech & AdTech

In the second blogpost of our series about Collider’s newest cohort of startups, we introduce Turff, a company founded by three students of Technical University Delft. 

Confronted with the hassle of tracking and splitting shared beverages and other products in student houses, they developed a solution to track (“turf” in Dutch) consumptions and manage financials in an easy way. Tracking is done on a wall mounted tablet that also serves as a unique advertising medium for brands looking to micro target students. 

Introduced in Delft with an MVP in November 2019, the Turff tablet became an instant success and was rapidly rolled out in other student cities. The tablet is now installed in almost 1000 student houses in 15 cities, reaching 12000+ active users, making Turff a “household name” for students. 

Another exciting development was a successful pilot with beer ordering & delivery in February this year. Students were able to order beer through Turff and it was delivered right to their doorstep on the same day.

These successes would not have happened without hard work behind the scenes. We asked Turff how Collider added value to this journey: “Especially as a student-run startup, the expertise from the experienced crackteam members is really valuable to us. They provide not only assistance in the areas we did not focus on in the beginning, but they also help improve our current processes.” Collider specifically helped the Turff team with optimisation of their sales funnel and organisation, customer discovery, legals and business model - bringing in expertise from our investors whenever relevant.  

Turff’s plan for the future is to first fully capture the student houses market, before entering other markets such as students and sport associations, and company canteens. The vision is to eventually become the go-to platform for cost splitting between groups. We are excited to be part of their journey!

www.turff.nl 

The power of voice - our startup cashew

Collider's 2.0 programme is specifically designed for later stage marketing, advertising and commerce tech startups with product market fit. We are happy to have completed our selection of five amazing startups that we will introduce in this series. We will talk about their innovative solutions, their biggest successes, and what they get out of the hands-on scaling support from Collider.

Cashew was the first to join this new programme, they are at the forefront of voice advertising, helping publishers and skill developers to monetise voice. Check out their website here: https://www.cashew.ai/

Cashew offers interactive voice ads on smart speakers such as Alexa; a new ad format built specifically for voice. So instead of only listening to an ad the customer now actively engages with it. This interactive engagement with the customer delivers outstanding results and cashew outperforms digital ads 3:1. The startup came up with four different ad types - traditional product ads, reward-driven ads, quiz-based ads, and functional ads. Additionally, impressions, engagements, and actions of users are tracked immediately and provided.

One of their biggest successes was winning and launching the first virtual voice tour of a destination, which is Abu Dhabi. This audio experience allows the user to experience the destination from the comfort of their own home. Each tour is unique since the user can choose between different paths on what to discover in Abu Dhabi. The full experience takes several minutes, and guides the user through cultural wonders, nature spots, and restaurants. You can check it out here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbtKnqNy-bg&feature=youtu.be.

So, why did cashew join Collider?

“Collider focuses on marketing and advertising, and we were keen to set up an office in the Netherlands. The crackteam added value by helping us out in areas where we have little expertise; it is like having a full board of experts helping you in the initial phases of company development. By posing the right questions they nudged us in the right direction, while allowing us to find our own stance. Having Collider on board really helped us to get our company set and running and launching our business in the Netherlands.”

Their vision for the future is to see voice and voice assistants becoming common in all areas of our lives. Cashew’s founder can see a world where smart assistants are a crucial part of our daily life, providing an experience that no other device can offer. It is a real joy to help the advanced startup and we are excited to see their outstanding vision of the future come to life.