Liberty Global Ventures and Comcast Ventures stepped to the plate to lead an $11 million second round of financing for advertising enabler Integrate.
Led by former NFL football player and World Cup and Olympic freestyle moguls skier Jeremy Bloom, who co-founded the company two years ago with Hart Cunningham, Integrate’s mission statement is to plug all of the various advertising channels into one unified platform.
Integrate said the Series B financing, which also included existing investor Foundry Group, will help drive the next phase of product development and also get the company closer to its goal of connecting every channel of advertising into one unified platform.
Integrate addresses the problem that audiences are now more fragmented, and new media is becoming more measurable, effectively shifting the $280 billion advertising market from a disconnected channel model to an interconnected performance model.
“We are extremely excited about Integrate’s vision to become a leading cross-channel marketplace for the purchase of performance-based advertising,” said Sam Landman, principal at Comcast Ventures. “As advertisers shift more budget toward performance buys, and as audiences become increasingly fragmented, Integrate is using technology to simplify process and optimize results for their customers.”
Integrate advertisers leverage ad optimization and audience analysis data to plan, launch, track and analyze ROI, and to optimize performance advertising campaigns across both online and offline channels.
“Today’s successful advertisers need more than an outstanding creative approach. They need an integrated distribution strategy that places their messages in front of the right eyeballs on the right devices, combined with real-time attribution data that measures the full impact per channel,” said Bloom, who played football briefly for the Philadelphia Eagles and Pittsburgh Steelers and won three World Cup titles in skiing.
Integrate has built a technology that automates ad serving, tracking and the attribution value for advertisers in a combination of online (including mobile, display, email, social, digital video) and offline (telemarketing, television, print, radio, outdoor, billboard) channels to pursue, monitor and measure their advertising impacts.
“As the largest international cable operator, we see great potential in performance-based campaigns to provide us with more visibility and accountability in our marketing spend than traditional forms of advertising. We view Integrate as a value-add platform that can assist us in managing the complexity of multiple performance-based campaigns, while providing us with hard data regarding the performance of those campaigns,” said Bruce Dines, vice president of Liberty Global Ventures.