No soon­er had we report­ed on a friend­ly Dan­ish inva­sion of New York than we need to make anoth­er announce­ment: to all those busi­ness devel­op­ment man­agers (and oth­ers) with media jobs in the Big Apple’s online adver­tis­ing sales mar­ket, watch out — the Rus­sians are coming.

From Rus­sia with verve

As with Fal­con Social, how­ev­er, this arrival will be a wel­come new neigh­bor. Moscow-head­quar­tered native video adver­tis­ing plat­form Buz­zo­ola Inc. has just opened a new office in NYC in the wake of a $2 mil­lion seed fund­ing round. The startup’s move to the US is sim­i­lar­ly moti­vat­ed: Buz­zo­ola has com­plet­ed a series of suc­cess­ful video cam­paigns for a slew of clients in the Ukraine and Rus­sia. But most are For­tune 500 com­pa­nies and media agen­cies head­quar­tered in the USA.

Expand­ing onto US turf with clients like that, as any savvy busi­ness devel­op­ment man­ag­er could tell you, makes emi­nent sense. The com­pa­ny is bare­ly three years old (it launched in 2011) but it’s been around long enough to see the ongo­ing trend amongst adver­tis­ers to spend good­ly swathes of their dol­lars on videos which peo­ple view on social media sites via their mobile devices.

Buz­zo­ola is bank­ing on this trend gath­er­ing momen­tum and it seems like a pret­ty sol­id gam­ble. Ana­lysts at BIA/Kelsey recent­ly fore­cast that this par­tic­u­lar avenue for gen­er­at­ing online adver­tis­ing sales will have grown to 42 per­cent of the total social adver­tis­ing spend (that’s $5 bil­lion) by 2017.

The startup’s CEO, Natalia Solo­dukho­va, said:

“The explo­sive growth in the native video adver­tis­ing mar­ket has dri­ven more and more brands to seek out tools that enable them to have a glob­al reach. Estab­lish­ing a pres­ence in New York City just made sense giv­en that Buzzoola’s biggest clients are head­quar­tered here and we want to ser­vice their grow­ing needs at both a local and glob­al level.”

New US executive

To advance its US project, the com­pa­ny has hired Jane Roy as pres­i­dent of its North Amer­i­can oper­a­tions. With 17 years of expe­ri­ence in man­ag­ing mar­ket­ing strate­gies and sales for a mul­ti­tude of nation­al brands and media agen­cies (amongst them Datran Media, Exper­ian, Under­tone and TRAFFIQ), Roy brings a very steady busi­ness hand to the helm.

Buzzoola’s tech­nol­o­gy enables instant video cam­paign deploy­ment across a curat­ed, brand-safe net­work of social games, mobile apps and sites.