Comcast Ventures leads $11M in ad-platform Integrate

Two-year-old start-up aims to create unified advertising platform

There's a new advertising solution in town and it's far more ambitious than the typical point solutions that focus on mobile, or social, or TV, or video. This one is designed to be an entire soup-to-nuts advertising platform.

Co-founded by Jeremy Bloom, a two-time World Champion and Olympic skiier, who also played in the NFL, Integrate likes to go fast and big.

Since starting Integrate in April 2010, Bloom and his team have already raised $15.25 million, with $11 million announced Wednesday. 

The Series B round of funding comes from Comcast Ventures and Liberty Global, with existing investor Foundry Group participating again. This brings the total round of funding to moer than $15 million, which includes a $4.5 million round led by Foundry Group in December 2010.

"We took a top-down approach on the entire advertising marketplace," said Bloom, in an interview with me. "If you look at what’s important to brands, first, it's the message and where they want their advertising to run – TV, email, social, mobile. Secondly, it's performance: How does the advertisement work and what's the ROI?"

Integrate decided to focus on enabling brands to reach out across multiple mediums and to track the performance. Sounds like a big nut to crack, given that many start-ups and companies in general focus on becoming very good at handling one type of advertising medium.

But therein lies the opportunity, said Bloom. 

"If you look at how crowded ad-tech is, there are thousands of companies building point solutions – single-channel solutions... it’s incredibly fragmented and competitive," he explained. "We saw an oporutniy to sit on top of it all, and integrate all the methods – all offline methds with online methods and marry them together in a single-tracking platform so that advertisers can integrate and select the method of distribution and not have to build out relationships with publisghers on different methods."

So far so good, since launching in April 2010, with seed funding from Bloom and co-founder Hart Cunningham, the company has grown from two people to more than 150. And, the client list has grown to 1500, including Microsoft and Yahoo. 

Right now, the average campaign size is around $10,000 a month, said Bloom. Customers typically pay on a performance basis, meaning they typically pay per click, pay per action or pay per phone call. If a client says they'll pay $1 per click, Integrate will take between 5% and 30% of that fee and give the rest to the publisher. 

But it doesn't stop there. "Their [a customer] goal is not only create new users, but the real end goal is to create purchases," said Bloom. "We’ve built a software that automatically plugs into the publishers and then plugs into the purchase-conversion database so that we can see the performance of every publisher at a purchase-converion rate."

The idea is basically to move away from impressions but to track actual performance, he said.

It's no wonder Comcast took a close look and decided to invest in Integrate. Comcast and Liberty Global, the second largest cable provider in the world, behind Comcast) plan to use Integrate to help them be more effective with their advertising spend.