Medialets

Today we’re very excited to announce we’ve closed a $6 million Series B round of financing, bringing previous investors The Foundry Group and DFJ Gotham back, along with new investors 500 Startups, Dave McClure’s new venture fund, and Chris Saridakis’ Great Barn Ventures.  We plan on using the proceeds to focus on the growth of our mobile rich media ad platform and supporting tools that together will continue to bring rich media ads to the broadest range of advertisers possible.

When Medialets was founded in June of 2008, online rich media had already been established as the most effective way for brands to engage users online. Meanwhile, the adoption of smartphones – devices that offered an environment with even greater potential for rich interactivity than desktops – was accelerating quickly. Yet no one had figured out the ad model that took advantage of their most interesting new features.  Early on we recognized that if there was a way to tap into the rich potential of smartphones, brands would embrace the ability to deliver highly engaging rich media to mobile users. There was an opportunity to be at the head end of what in a few years had the potential to grow from an emerging market to a multi-billion dollar industry.

We started with the Feedburner model of free developer tools – in our case, application analytics – as a means to build an ad network, with the intent to dive into that data to get a better understanding of what ultimately would work as an ad model.  We launched our first rich media ad in April of 2009, a shakeable ad for Dockers and OMD, and immediately was flooded with interest from both brands and publishers wanting to do similar things. But there was a rub: the brands looking to do this kind of advertising generally wanted to advertise in well known publishers’ apps, and the publishers who wanted to do rich media ads wanted to keep them as premium ad products and sell them themselves, rather than have them sold by a network. So with a bit of tuning, we shifted away from an ad network to a platform that allowed publishers to sell rich media ads direct to brands.

Publishers responded. Our mobile rich media ad platform is now integrated into the iPhone, iPad and/or Android apps of most of the major media brands, including Bing, Cars.com, CBS, CNN, CondeNast, Esquire, Fandango, FOX, HuffingtonPost.com, New York magazine, The New York Times, NPR, Pandora, Slate, Time Inc., The Washington Post, Weatherbug, The Weather Channel, Variety, Yahoo!, among many others.

Our executive team comes from the trenches of the online advertising space. I was co-founder of Proxicom, one of the big interactive agencies from the Web 1.0 days and CEO of global agency Viaduct. Keith Gelles, our CTO, was the co-founder and CTO of PointRoll, the company that defined the online rich media space. Aaron Mittman, VP Global Sales, built and ran the publisher sales team for DoubleClick and NetGravity prior to that. And Medialets’ new CFO, Andrew Eisele, was the CFO/COO of TargetSpot.  Our executive team is supported by an advisory board that includes Greg Tagaris, former CIO DoubleClick, Andy Ellenthal, CEO Peer39, Ari Paparo, EVP Product Leadership at Nielsen and former Product Director of Advertiser Products at Google, Shervin Pishevar, Chairman SGN, Bobby Yazdani, CEO Saba Software and early Google / Salesforce.com investor, Colin Crawford, former CEO MacWorld/PC World, and Robert Davidman, CEO EarthQuake Media.

We have since grown to be what is essentially the de facto standard for rich media ads for the premium mobile ad market–a market where rich media will likely capture an even greater percentage than the 20% it has for online advertising. By tapping into the creative potential of mobile devices, by making it possible to run creatives across platforms, by providing reports that allow advertisers to compare like metrics across platforms, by operating as an infrastructure that enables publishers, ad networks, ad mediators, ad servers, etc, to make the most of mobile ad inventory, we have addressed the obstacles that hindered a proven, established online practice from going mobile.

Rich media was already out there, we just brought it to mobile in such a way that makes it the best option for brands looking to reach consumers in mobile, and we’ve built the technology platform to bring it to much bigger scale than it’s ever been before. Stay tuned, we’re just getting started.