As long time leaders in the influencer and social media spaces, eCommence company Crowd Media (ASX: CM8) have had much of their digital market invaded through the pandemic, but emerged in a better than ever position thanks to prude capital management and their newly formed artificial intelligence alliance.
Key to Crowd’s financial improvement has been their preservation of cash through scaling back of their legacy businesses. This included a reduction in the digital marketing spend for retail partners when the eCommerce adverting market was proliferated by new entries who normally targeted their advertising towards brick-and-mortar retail, but ceased during pandemic lockdowns, thus saturating the online marketing space.
The Company is now focusing primarily on developing their AI-powered Talking Head platform tipped to revolutionise eCommerce and influencer marketing. This has resulted in net tangible backing of each CM8 share increasing by a factor of 11.75x in the 12 months ending 31 December 2020.
“Crowd is positioned better than ever. we have disposed of external influence via “unfriendly” debt: we currently have around $5m in cash, giving us 2.5+ years of funding based on current expenditure run-rate,” said Chairman, Steven Schapera.
“We have assembled an execution team to drive our Talking Head vision to commercialisation. With Aflorithmic, Forever Holdings, VFR and UneeQ at our table, I believe we have market-leading partners and have strengthened our position substantially.”
With plans on track to commercialise their platform in 2022, Crowd’s Talking Head platform is the next frontier of conversational commerce where they will evolve text-only chatbots into fully immersive Talking Heads that look like, sound like and respond like celebrities and social influencers.
This will be powered by Crowd’s chatbot technology, which since invention has answered more than 180 million user-submitted questions, and now be driven by their artificial intelligence.
Through their AI alliance, Crowd’s Q&A chatbot will power the content behind conversations conducted by a talking head, while its partners are leaders in voice cloning, 3D imaging, digital humans and virtual reality.
While Crowd reported a $2.2m net loss for the Half-Year, the Company’s tech development is still driven by substantial revenue, having delivered $6.9m over the same period to be generating significantly more revenue than other small cap artificial intelligence companies.
“Make no mistake, I detest making losses. However, I also understand that if we are to adapt our legacy business model so that Crowd sits on a stronger foundation in 2021 then we have to “bite a few bullets”,” said Schapera.
“Shareholders began the calendar year 2020 with a net tangible asset backing for each Crowd share of 0.08cents. By the end of the year this had improved by a factor of 11.75x to 0.94cents due to capital raising. In the same period, the share price went up from $0.019 to $0.056, a factor of 2.95x.”
Crowd Media is expected to showcase the next evolution of their Talking Head avatars in the coming months following the launch of Emma – the beta version – in November 2020.
For their latest development updates, Crowd Media welcomes investors to join their mailing list here.
Alfred Chan is a Business Reporter at The Sentiment specialising in ASX-listed small cap companies, a bloodstock enthusiast and former equities analyst.
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