Eyeka raises €3 million for crowd-sourcing ad campaigns

logo_eyeka-300x167[France] Eyeka, which connects brands and creative consumers, has raised €3 million in a second round of financing. The company already had €5 million in backing in 2006 with Ventech, DN Capital and SFR Developpement, while the company was focused on a platform to enhance pictures and videos management from mobiles. For this new round, previous investors are joined by French VC I-Source. This new round is to accelerate their international development and develop new product. Essentially speaking it’s a platform for corwd-sourcing ad campaigns for ad agencies and brands.

Eyeka is one of the leaders in the new wave of the “consumer engagement” business, as it’s being called. They enable brands or agencies to leverage the creativity of Eyeka’s (more than 75,000) to create innovative and disruptive campaigns, while establishing direct links with them. Based on a brief, members are asked to create general videos or sometimes photos. The winner (the one selected by the agency or the brand) gets rewarded for creating the campaign that work.s Of course, this is a great way to get cheap creative executions, while sending a windfall of several thousands of euros to some lucky teenager that’s good with a video camera.

Eyeka is based in Paris and Singapore (20 employees and 5 employees) and they’ve announced [PDF] that they’ll soon open an office in London. Their platform is however already in several languages (English, French, German, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese). In 2009, they made 60 campaigns with major brands (Coca-Cola, eBay, Nike, Philips, Danone, Hewlett Packard, Numericable, Standard Chartered…) but also major agencies (Young & Rubicam, Publicis, AKQA, BBH, OMD et MediaEdge).

Eyeka CEO François Petavy announced in an interview they could have reached break-even but preferred to accelerate and invest.