Ace Metrix pulls in $8M for faster TV ad testing

As more people turn to social media to voice their opinions, TV ads become more vulnerable

Ace Metrix, a provider of real-time television analytics, announced Tuesday that it raised $8 million in new funding.

The financing came from WPP, Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, Leapfrog Ventures, and Palomar Ventures. Ace Metrix plans to use the new funds to further accelerate its growth, continue its focus on innovation and product development, and expand into new markets.

Founded in 2007, Ace Metrix has been building a platform where advertisers are able to develop, deploy and target their television and online advertising.

So far the company has raised close to $19 million.

CEO Peter Daboll, previously worked as Chief of Insights at Yahoo and CEO of comScore Media Metrix, and sees the crucial need to evaluate the effectiveness of digital advertisement and targeting to stay competitive as the method of television consumption evolves.

Previously, the time it took to put out and survey and ad to see how audiences responded was in the four to six week range, now Ace Metrix can deliver survey data about an ad’s effectiveness within just a couple days.

Now that audiences are very quick to respond on the Internet and small groups of people are able to be very vocal about their feelings regarding video content, advertisers have to be able to cut through the noise and know when something is effective and resonated for the right reason, or is causing more problems than solutions -- and wide-spread audience responses are a key component to that.

With around $71 billion going into TV advertisements and emerging video, there are a lot of people making very pricey decisions who can afford to spend a few days getting feedback, rather than going in blind or eating up more resources with a one to two month survey.

Daboll said, in a statement, that his company is on track for 100% growth rate through 2012 and that Ace Metrix is interested in offering services to key adjacent markets in the near future. 

Currently, Ace Metrix has more than 16,000 scored television and online video ads across 75 categories, each with more than 12,000 quantitative and qualitative data points.