Shakr is helping mom and pop shops compete with Nike for video ad space

It’s 2015, and the video ad wars are upon us. Facebook’s auto-play ads have reached 4 billion plays per day, shattering all expectations for growth. Youtube remains the top dog – for now – by offering advertisers a wider array of options for how and when their ads play. But even as access to the video ad market gets easier, content production can still be a costly proposition for smaller businesses. Services that provide affordable templates for professional-grade video ads have cropped up, and South Korean startup Shakr could be the one to beat.

Shakr gives its users access to an ever-expanding library of After Effects templates – currently 1,200 – that they can populate with their own photos, text, and videos to create fully-rendered video ads in a matter of minutes. Many users mix and match, trying a few different templates before ponying up for the finished product. The average price of US$80 per template is peanuts compared to typical production budgets, often in the five-figure territory.

This is a relatively new direction for Shakr, which originally focused on personal video content creation. Moving into video ad production meant acquiring designers to produce the volume of unique templates demanded by fast-moving marketers. Rather than hire a handful of designers to produce full-time, Shakr has gone after the best and brightest freelancers to produce templates in a royalty-based business model. While most freelancers earn one-time fees for their work, Shakr’s designers keep 70 percent of the money earned each time one of their templates is purchased. Shakr co-founder David Lee says that creatively empowering designers is transforming the company.

“We now have 540 designers on board, and we’re adding as many as 15 a day,” says Lee. “This model gives their earnings some stability, which they clearly want. Our template numbers are already growing exponentially.”

Helping Mom and Pop

Shakr founder David Lee at Tech in Asia Tokyo 2015

Shakr’s goal is still to provide high-quality content at low prices to bring small businesses into the video ad game. Though many of the service’s users are larger companies that enjoy Shakr’s versatility, Lee and his co-founder Dave Jansen see massive growth potential in reaching the myriad mom-and-pop operations that have never advertised with video before.

“We recently had three local businesses team up to buy time on a huge screen in downtown Seoul for about US$1,000 each, plus the $100 or so for their templates,” says Lee. “It was just so cool to look up in one of Seoul’s busiest intersections and see a Nike ad followed by one for a flower shop the size of a van.”

Though Shakr isn’t releasing its sales figures just yet, early data is promising. Videos produced on Shakr have a 5 to 7.5 percent clickthrough rate, compared with 4 to 6 percent for Facebook – and that’s who Lee says Shakr is gunning for.

At today’s Tech in Asia Tokyo 2015 Arena pitch battle, Lee delivered an electrifying final presentation, showing off several of Shakr’s client success stories. Arena judge Akio Tanaka praised Shakr’s user interface, but cautioned that it might be the ad-buying from companies like Google which could prove confusing to small business owners.

“That’s a short-lived problem,” says Lee. “We’ve taken care of the hardest part of the process.”

This is part of the ongoing coverage of Tech in Asia Tokyo 2015, our annual conference taking place on September 8 and 9.