Medialets continues its tear, get $8.4M in funding

Widely-deployed rich media mobile ad platform nabs more funding, no doubt will continue innovating

Medialets, which touts itself as the most widely-deployed rich media platform for mobile announced Wednesday an $8.4 million round of equity, bringing the company's current total funding to $18.4 million.  Funding terms were not disclosed, though past Medialets investors include DFJ Gotham Ventures, 500 Startups, and Foundry Group. 

Medialets' mobile ad platform implements technology that selectively targets advertising to users based on their mobile activity.

One example of what the company does is their recent Toyota “Pickups of the Week” campaign on Yahoo! Fantasy Football, created with Saatchi and Saatchi. This campaign runs on mobile devices as an animated banner that the user can expand to access a Yahoo! “Pickups of the Week” feed. The company integrated the ads between the Yahoo and the Toyota platforms, as well as measured the conversion rates between said platforms against a variety of other data sets connected to individual users.

The company traffics and oversees each ad to make sure that ad campaigns are delivering optimally, using a large array of criteria for data collection, including time of day, geo-location, user-registration data, app content, device type, and connection status and type.

"Our rich media ad platform is designed to address the full-spectrum of the advertising ecosystem across smartphone & tablet devices, enabling advertisers, agencies, publishers, ad networks, ad servers, ad mediators and developers to benefit from high-impact mobile advertising," says the company's website.

Additionally, Medialets produces ads geared toward specific mobile apps in advance of their sale, so that the deployment of the app has ads built in. They call this method of tailoring ads to specific apps, and thus the users of said apps, to speed along ad deployment, "asynchronous delivery."

Medialets also provides "deep app and campaign analytics," for advertisers and ad agencies, a comprehensive data analytics service to optimize app usage. Data is available to clients through Medialets' online analytics reporting tool, Medialytics, which provides real-time data, charts, and graphs pertinent to ad performance in apps.

Medialets updated their software development kit (SDK) in July 2011, enabling third-party rich media providers like Google, Mediamind, Sprout, and Unicast to offer campaigns directly to advertisers and publishers. Medialets claims this allowed third-party providers access to over 30 billion ad impressions across its publishers.

Concurrent with this update was a series of social features updates for ad formatting within Medialets' advertising tech, including social media sharing and email/texting functionality.

Another notable Medialets development happened last April with the company's launch of Muse, a comprehensive management dashboard for rich media mobile ads. This tool provides a central interface for a given agency's ad initiatives, as well as features like commenting, timelines, email alerts, and review/approval features.

Medialets could not be reached for immediate comment.