If you’re an advertiser, you probably know full well that there are a lot of places for you to run your ads: billboards, radio, TV, print, and the web come to mind, each of which can be fine-tuned to hone in on certain verticals and demographics. And given the broad range of choices for advertisers, it isn’t surprising that running these multi-media campaigns can be a time-consuming and difficult task.
That is, unless you can turn to a platform that can handle all of them at once. That’s the promise offered by Integrate, a startup that launched in February of this year that allows advertisers to purchase placement on everything from billboards to the web from a single site. Today, the company is announcing that it’s closed a $4.25 million funding round led by the Foundry Group.
Integrate’s system allows advertisers to place their contextual ads into multiple ad networks without having to deal with each one individually; it can also place ads on TV, on billboards, and through other channels.
All of Integrate’s transactions are done on a performance basis — you pay based on how well your ad is converting. The system does this by assigning unique 800 numbers (or web URLs) to each ad campaign, allowing Integrate to determine how many potential customers have been acquired as a result of the ad (calls are all recorded to verify accuracy). Founder Jeremy Bloom says that since launch, the company has run over 1,000 campaigns.
Integrate also provides a platform where advertisers and publishers can discuss possible deals. For example, an advertiser could log into the platform, specify which regions they wanted their ads to appear in and to whom, and state that they’re willing to spend $10 per acquisition. A publisher can then say which of these requests they can fulfill, and can also say whether they’d like a price adjustment. Integrate takes a cut of each transaction, but it varies depending on the vertical and the size of the allocation.
All of these negotiations are done on Integrate’s platform, and while there’s a chance advertisers and publishers could scheme to finalize their deal elsewhere (so as to avoid giving Integrate its cut), Bloom says that these conversations are all reviewed by the company’s employees, and that everyone in the system is credible to begin with because of a vetting process.
Bloom says that some of the platform’s functionality is available through other systems, but that this is the only one that offers this flexibility on a performance basis, as opposed to CPM. Other players in this space include Right Media Exchange.
Also worth noting: Bloom has a pretty incredible resume. He’s a two-time Olympian, three-time World Champion, and eleven-time World Cup gold medalist snow skier. He also played NCAA football at the University of Colorado and was drafted into the NFL.