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Blackstone Senior Managing Director David Blitzer, former Saks CEO Steve Sadove and the former managing director of Goldman Sachs Dan Petrozzo have invested $700, 00 in a new app called Claim It!, which gives out all sorts of free gifts to its users like free drinks and gift cards.
Claim It! Calls itself a product giveaway platform; a weekly sweepstakes of “awesome free stuff” people can claim from their smartphones.
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The tag line: “Only one app gives you the chance to win amazing free products from awesome brands, every week.”
The app earns revenue by streaming video ads. The company says that its mostly millennial base is more than happy to watch these commercials if they have a chance to win prizes just for doing so.
This is actually quite a brilliant concept. The print media is dying, in part, because advertisers know that people simply do not read the ads in newspapers any more. Television networks are bleeding viewers to cable and internet streaming and with DVRs people simply skip the commercials.
So how do companies get people to actually watch their commercials these days? By having a captive audience.
Claim It! Says that it sells views, not impressions. It also uses the location of a user’s mobile device to determine what retail outlets they are near and to provide them with information on how to get there. So it can drive customers to retail outlets by showing them commercials for whatever stores are near to them.
Users put in a claim on a given week’s offers and wait for the Sunday drawing. Winners have one week to pick up their prizes.
Claim It! Claims to have attracted 42, 000 users and shown 227, 000 ads since it launched in January.
