Greystripe, the rich media mobile advertising network, today announced that they have raised an additional $5.5 million in Series C funding led by its existing investor, Incubic Venture Capital, with Steamboat Ventures and Monitor Ventures participating. The company, which has already experienced strong growth in the mobile content distribution and monetization business, is now aiming to solve the biggest problem in mobile advertising.
Despite massive industry projections around mobile advertising's 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, 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," said Darren Kuhn, Director of eMarketing at LeapFrog, a Greystripe partner.
Fueled by this new round of financing, Greystripe's focus is to continue to build mobile campaigns from online ad budgets. A recent campaign with Hewlett-Packard (HP) came out of HP's digital advertising budget where they simply checked a box for mobile and were able to extend their campaign to the third screen. The effects of the rich media HP campaign, which ran from January 16th to February 6th, will be released in a Comscore Study in March 2009. This campaign follows Greystripe's recent, successful rich media ad campaign with Unilever Axe which saw a 15% brand lift and also came out of Axe's online ad budget.
"For too long the mobile advertising world has built a silo approach to their business," said Michael Chang, CEO and Co-Founder of Greystripe. "Those days are over. It's time to join the online advertising world and bring new value in terms of reach, targeting and interactivity."
In addition to their funding, Robert J. Majteles, Founder of Treehouse Capital LLC, has joined Greystripe's Board of Directors.