Press: CityAM - Keeping in the Loop With Stephen Upstone

Written and Printed in CityAM, October 31st.

Stephen Upstone, chief executive and founder of LoopMe, is pondering his company’s reach.

“I think that out of the top 10 global brands, as rated by Interbrand, we work with eight of them,” he says.

His business has touched 1.5bn people, handles 500bn bits of data a day, and has opened offices from Los Angeles to Bangalore. Not bad for a four year old company.

Like so many tech companies, LoopMe operates in the background, exerting a subtle influence over our digital lives.

“Think of it as a software platform that puts video ads into apps and mobile websites,” says Upstone. “But what we do that’s particularly different is use artificial intelligence (AI) and a huge amount of data to improves customer experience, and advertisers’ results.”

Mobile revolution

As we move away from desktop to spend more time gazing into our phones, LoopMe has moved in to capitalise on the mobile revolution. “Before video ads couldn’t really be played on mobile because the bandwidth wasn’t strong enough,” says Upstone, but “now 68 per cent of the time we spend digitally is with mobile, and video is king.”

Video advertising is (and always has been) so successful, says Upstone, because it “instills empathy in people. It creates a really strong emotional connection and makes them feel better about brands.” The uptake of video on mobile has been nothing short of a game changer for advertisers – there’s no denying it works, but the wastage, that is, showing people irrelevant adverts, was mammoth.

Read the rest of the article on CityAM here.