Company History

2012

Following significant growth in 2011, InSkin Media is opening (June 2012) a new European office in Germany (Hamburg). The business continued to expand, with the London team growing, and sales activity in Spain as well as UK and Scandinavia. 2012 also sees the launch of InSkin Media's new format, PageSkin Tablet, for iPads and Tablet devices. In May 2012, InSkin Media was awarded 3 prestigious prizes at the inaugural British Media Awards, and also ranked 25th in Media Momentum's fastest-growing digital businesses.

2011

Today InSkin Media has 31 staff, 4 ad formats, and offices in London and Stockholm. The company's goal for 2011 is further UK growth and rapid international expansion.

2010

2010 was a year of further growth for InSkin Media with over 450 campaigns run during the year, 250 leading publisher websites integrated into the network, and over 100m ad requests per month processed. InSkin Media had by now established itself as a leading, premium rich media ad network. The company also achieved it's key target of becoming cashflow positive.

2009

In 2009 the company set up its London office in Soho, appointing former Telegraph Media Group managing director Hugo Drayton as CEO.

Drayton assembled an experienced industry team, and the company began to establish the InSkin format as a standard for more effective online video monetisation. The company also invented and launched two new advertising formats: PageSkin - an interactive ad that wraps around the entire perimeter of a web page; and i-Roll - an interactive, clickable pre-roll format. By the end of 2009 the company had over 100 premium publisher websites within the InSkin network and over 250 InSkin ad campaigns had been delivered.

2008

After filing a patent for the inventions, 2008 was a year of product development for InSkin Media. As well as developing a player-agnostic InSkin ad delivery technology, the development team created ISAP (InSkin Ad Platform), a purpose-built ad server, future-proofed for the delivery of the next wave of InSkin Media's ad format inventions. Late 2008 saw the launch of the first InSkin ad campaigns with leading UK publishers, including Telegraph Media Group, IPC Media and Bauer. The early campaign results were outstanding; at this point that the company accepted investment from Caravel Capital and Justin Byam Shaw, in order to prepare for growth.

Oct 2006

In October 2006 Patrick Knight founded UGTV Ltd in Bournemouth. UGTV (User Generated TV) planned to launch a new online video website, 'Me-V', an online version of 'X Factor', enabling consumers to upload their videos and enter talent contests, in the hope of achieving 15 minutes of fame. However, there was no appropriate ad format for monetising short-form video content on Me-V. So Patrick designed a new ad format, an ad served Into a Skin, that wrapped unobtrusively around the video player, yet was more impactful and engaging than existing formats.

While the tech team was developing Me-V's website, Knight realised that other publishers were seeking more effective ways to commercialise video on their websites. This led to a change of direction for UGTV, which abandoned Me-V and developed the InSkin ad format into an industry standard, so that any publisher, regardless of which video player or ad server it used, could exploit the InSkin format to monetise its online video websites. With this change of direction came a renamed company: InSkin Media Ltd.