The old ways of advertising in legacy media just won't work in an XR environment, so Admix CEO Samuel Huber has tried to figure out more effective ways to peddle products in a virtual realm. Today he explores his XR marketing ethos, which focuses on the user first.

Alan: Today's guest is Samuel Huber, founder and CEO of Admix, the first ad tech platform for mixed reality, giving XR developers the best tools to monetize their content.  Admix is a platform that allows advertisers to place non-intrusive ads into VR and AR and gaming content. Their platform allows companies to filter hundreds of advertisers via their programmatic platform, and start generating revenue within minutes. Previous to Admixed, Sam was part of the e-commerce platform Kout.io, social gambling app Betify and the first binary trading game on the app store, Rogue Trader. Admix is a venture-backed startup, having raised $2.4-million. You can learn more about Samuel and Admix by visiting: https://admix.in/

Sam, welcome to the show.

Sam: Hey Alan, how are you? Good to be here.

Alan: I’m fantastic; thank you so much for being on the show.

Sam: Thanks for having me, man.

Alan: It’s my absolute pleasure. For the people who don't know you, I know you're very active on LinkedIn. For those who don't know, do you want to just introduce yourself and introduce Admix in your own words? Describe what your company does and what your service and platform does to serve businesses.

Sam: Yeah, yeah, for sure. I started Admix about two years ago now, initially based in London. Now we have also an office in San Francisco. The whole idea that we realize is that there's so many great, immersive content being created, whether it's VR, AR, and this is really going to be the way that content is going to be consumed in the future. Right? Whether it's for entertainment, games, education, training -- all of this stuff is going to be spatial content. And what we figured out is, there's already great content being created, but very little incentive for the creators -- or ways for them -- to actually monetize this content. On the web, if you create a website, you can go to Google and you get a tag, and you can put ads and you can make a living out of it. But that's actually not what happens right now in VR and AR. I think over the next few years, we're going to see a lot of paid apps migrating to free content. That's generally the way things go. And at that point, these developers are going to look for a new business model and advertising is going to play a massive part of it. 

However, from the very beginning, our idea was to build a better future for advertising. Not banners and pop-ups and annoying, that are already terrible on the web, and would be even worse in VR and AR. But instead, creating an advertising model that really works for this immersive content. So, we're talking about product placement. It's how brands can be part of the experience, part of the creative process without intruding, but while still generating great return for the developers. So that's really what we've built. It's a simple SDK that integrates with Unity as a content creator, or you can drag and drop product placement within your experience. We then connect that to a massive network of advertisers. 

So basically, you create your app at Admix and you can get revenue generating in about three or four minutes. And it's continuous. It's instant revenue. And so far, the developers that we work with really, really like us. We have about 22 people now in the company, raised over 2 million dollars last year, and we are expanding this year internationally as well.

Alan: That's incredible. So, here you are: you start a company two years a