Advertising analytics company iSpot.TV said it raised $30 million in new capital that will be used to grow its business.
The Series C round was led by Insight Venture Partners and Madrona Venture Group. iSpot has now raised $57.8 million since launching in 2012.
“Becoming a trusted, truly independent third-party measurement company for the world’s largest brands is a difficult process very few have accomplished in the last few decades,” said Jeff Lieberman, managing director at Insight Venture Partners. “iSpot has proven that they are a clear leader in their market with their current suite of innovative measurement products. We look forward to working together with iSpot as they continue to advance the TV advertising measurement space.”
Related: Data Drives New Generation of TV Measurement
iSpot.TV is one of a number of data and analytics companies that are finding new ways to measure and evaluate TV advertising.
“We have entered a new era of TV advertising measurement that looks a lot more like digital, except on a medium not hampered by digital’s fraud challenges,” says iSpot founder and CEO Sean Muller.
The company has built a proprietary TV commercial database, using smart TV viewing data to measure audiences and correlate viewing to business outcomes.
“T-Mobile is driving change in wireless by obsessing over customers and rewriting the rules, which includes our approach to advertising,” says Nick Drake, executive VP for marketing at T-Mobile. “We trust iSpot and have partnered with them to push the envelope on how our TV advertising investment is deployed and how its effectiveness is measured.”
iSpot said its revenue has doubled each year over the past five years and its staff now numbers 154 people.
Muller said that iSpot will use the fresh capital to speed up its growth.
“We’re not going to do anything drastically different. Everything we’re doing is resonating with the marketplace in a major, major way,” Muller said. “We’ll use this capital to accelerate product development, data science, partnerships. We’re going to continue to accelerate building out our customer success team and consultative practices. We’re going to use it to accelerate sales and marketing. So we’re not actually going to do anything drastically different.”
Recently iSpot introduced a syndicated multi-touch attribution product for TV tune-in promotion that has been popular in the industry. The company is planning to unveil some other syndicated industry-specific products in the near future.
Muller noted that iSpots investors had also been backers of Moat and IAG. He said they are not looking to sell off iSpot or merge it with other data and analytics businesses.
“They believe we can dominate the space and be a huge stand-alone publicly traded company. And that’s what we believe. That’s the plan,” he said.
TripAdvisor credits iSpot attribution as helping its results. “Working in close collaboration with iSpot, we were able to develop a statistically defensible baseline,” says Tim D’Auria, head of TV optimization at TripAdvisor. “In short, we compare households exposed to our TV ads with nearly identical households that were not exposed. Differences in behavior after the ad can be attributed to TV.”
NBC has offered ad clients business outcome measurement supplied by iSpot.
