Antavo launches out of beta to challenge Wildfire with its WYSIWYG online promotions platform

Hungarian startup Antavo managed to secure some early-stage funding through Seedcamp earlier this year, after presenting its wares at the Tel Aviv event in May.

In a nutshell, Antavo is software to help marketers create and run online promotions, with a strong focus on Facebook. “We are challenging Wildfire Interactive by having a much more usable and marketer-friendly platform,” says Zsuzsi Szabo, Co-Founder and Chief Marketing Office (CMO) at Antavo.

It’s an interesting space for sure, with the likes of Woobox, Easypromos and Offerpop currently operating in the space, platforms Szabo cites as being Antavo’s key competitors at present. This is in addition to the mighty Wildfire, of course, which was recently acquired by Google.

So, what does Antavo bring to the table, and how does it plan to blaze a trail in the online promotions management space?

“The main difference is that our platform is just better to use,” opines Szabo. “It’s very marketer-friendly and visual – during the promotion-building process, you edit the app’s pages in the order your customer interacts with it. It helps you see your app’s mechanics better, and so you build better promotions.”

The story so far…

“We worked as a Web-agency before, and we had many requests for promotion apps for Facebook and micro-sites,” explains Szabo. “We thought we should build a platform for ourselves to save time building these apps. Then we decided to build a platform for our clients, so they don’t need us at all.

Antavo’s other Co-Founder (and CEO) Attila Kecsmar‘s Web agency started working with Szabo on the new marketing tool in July 2011, with it opening in private beta in September. This was followed by the public beta phase kicking off in November.

February 2012 heralded a boom in beta users, after the company reacted to a major roll-out at Facebook. “They launched Timeline Pages for Facebook, and we had our platform ready to build promotions for Timeline the next day,” says Szabo.

In March, the team attended Seedcamp in Tel Aviv, which resulted in them upping sticks and moving to London in April, armed with 1,000+ companies using its platform. This figure jumped to more than 3,000 users by the end of July. A new user-friendly platform followed suit, accompanied by a new website in early August.

So here we are today, with Antavo fully-launched product (as of last week).

In terms of how it works, marketers can choose a theme-style for their campaign:

They then control the campaign creation through the main dashboard which includes the front page, entry form, post entry page, details, setup, notifications, preview and, finally, activate:

The resulting campaign could look a little something like this:

In terms of costs, Antavo promises that users won’t pay more than $350 per campaign – prices start at $49.99 per promotion, plus $0.15 per lead. And though the campaigns are Antavo-branded, a white-label version is also available for companies to fully customize.

With social media being increasingly leveraged as marketing tools, we’ll no doubt begin seeing a slew of similar platforms in the future. But what Antavo does offer is a simple way for marketers to launch Facebook campaigns – and it certainly adheres to WYSIWYG principles. It offers a very visual and intuitive way of creating Facebook campaigns, which will appeal to many.

➤ Antavo