Vrtii.Me Wants to Revolutionize Mobile Advertising and Make It a Game of Chance
Advertising keeps inventing new and better way of selling products and services, and we keep getting bored of them really fast. Vrtii.Me is trying to fix that and make advertising fun for both the advertees and the advertising audience by making it a game of chance.
Vrtii.Me is essentially a smartphone game which looks like a digital slot machine, and you might not be surprised to hear that the founders got the idea for this kind of advertising when they were in a casino. Instead of a jackpot in change, you have a chance to win coupons for different products and service, freebies or discounts. As they told in their interview for Netokracija, the founders, Ivan Mrđen and Igor Gertić, were talking about the Million Dollar Website project, and pondered on doing something like that, but optimized for smatrphones.
First they wanted to make an advertisement roulette, but that turned out to be too complicated. A slot machine, on the other hand fit the role perfectey.
Reinventing Mobile Advertising
They decided to reinvent mobile advertising, because they thought the market was stagnating. Sure, banners were optimized for smartphone screens and a few new ideas cropped up here and there, but it is mostly just transferring the same old ways of advertising to a different format. Some guerilla marketing ideas tend to catch on during a certain campaign, but are soon abandoned when that campaign is done.
They don’t want Vrtii.Me to be used in one brand’s campaign and then forgotten. They want to make it an advertising platform that will stand the test of time. They also want to show that advertisement can be fun and beneficial for users and advertisers.
They got the idea in 2011 and had a bumpy road ahead of them, with no investments to ease their way. But their team has grown, and it now comprises Ruđer Novak-Mikulić, Marinko Murgić, Luka Blažecki and Marjan Patača.
They knocked on many doors, looking for investors, applied to different bootcamps but were told that the project is to far along for such events, and it wasn’t quite in that phase where venture capitalists would consider serious investment.
According to their calculations, Vrtii.Me need around 30 thousand Euros of investment to be up and running and ready for the international market. Their efforts, however, did not go urewarded in other ways- they got two very positive reviews by American marketing agencies and one mobile operator. After they gather the required funds, they plan on kicking off their project off in Vancouver, Canada.
Actually, they launched a campaign at Sell an App where 68 pledgers pledged more than $19,000. Good luck to Vrtii.Me, we wish them all the success and hope we will spin that slot machine on our smartphone soon.
