Greystripe Secures Funds, Aims to Solve Mobile Ad Conundrum
- Wednesday, March 11th, 2009
- Share this article:
Rich media mobile advertising network Greystripe has raised an additional $5.5 million (4million) in Series C funding, led by its existing investor, Incubic Venture Capital, with Steamboat Ventures and Monitor Ventures also participating. The company, which has already experienced strong growth in the mobile content distribution and monetization business, says it is now aiming to solve the biggest problem in mobile advertising.
Despite massive industry projections around mobile advertisings growth, many brands and agencies have debated the additional value in creating mobile-centric advertising formats and campaigns. Greystripe is looking to solve this issue by integrating its mobile inventory directly into industry-accepted online media buying software. This integration allows for ad agencies to simply click to add mobile and also allows for Flash advertisements, normally only available on the web, to appear on the iPhone.
With a unified ad platform connecting mobile and online, says Greystripe, the popular third screen will be able to offer web-like measurement, such as engagement, while eventually expanding to new levels of targeting, such as location.
In an economy where ad budgets are shrinking, mobile advertising campaigns will survive only by becoming part of the online ad budgets, says Darren Kuhn, Director of eMarketing at LeapFrog, a Greystripe partner.
Fuelled by this new round of financing, Greystripes focus is to continue to build mobile campaigns from online ad budgets. A recent campaign with Hewlett-Packard (HP) came out of HPs digital advertising budget, where they simply checked a box for mobile and were able to extend their campaign to the third screen. The results of the rich media HP campaign, which ran from 16 January to 6 February, will be released in a Comscore Study later this month. This campaign follows Greystripes recent, successful rich media ad campaign with Unilever Axe which saw a 15% brand lift, and also came out of Axes online ad budget.
For too long, the mobile advertising world has built a silo approach to their business, says Greystripe CEO, Michael Chang. Those days are over. Its time to join the online advertising world and bring new value in terms of reach, targeting and interactivity.