The Bellevue company provides TV advertisers with real-time information that can help in producing commercials. It plans to use the funding to accelerate product development and hiring.
Bellevue-based iSpot.tv, which tracks national TV ads and digital responses to them across Twitter, YouTube and other social-media sites, has raised $21.9 million in its latest round of funding.
The 3-year-old company plans to use the funds to accelerate product development and hiring as it sees strong demand among brands, networks and agencies that use digital measurements and real-time data in developing their television advertising.
“Brands want to become more responsive with their TV campaigns, and our data is the first stop,” founder and Chief Executive Sean Muller said in a statement. “TV is changing rapidly, and we are excited to bring on investment partners that share our vision for the future of TV and its measurement.”
The financing round was led by New York-based Insight Venture Partners and existing investor Seattle-based Madrona Venture Group.
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To date, iSpot.tv has raised more than $27.5 million and has grown to more than 60 employees and more than 150 clients, including ESPN, Volvo, T-Mobile and Sony Pictures. Muller projects the company will have 100 employees by the end of the year.
ISpot.tv tracks everything from when and where an ad is played, to the online views it gets on YouTube, to the comments posted on social media.
It measures thousands of TV commercials year-round, producing data that help advertising agencies and cable networks track ad performance, figure out which networks and which times of day are most effective to advertise, and provide competitive intelligence.
Customers pay about $150,000 a year to license data from iSpot.tv for specific categories such as wireless or auto. However, there are different levels of capabilities, which can make the price higher, Muller said in an email statement.
Muller, who has a background in digital content, formed iSpot.tv in 2012 because, he said, TV advertisers lacked real-time data. With a lag of four to six weeks from the time an ad aired to when the advertisers received data from existing ad-tracking services like Nielsen or Kantar Media, a viewer or researcher couldn’t easily find out who made a commercial or when it ran.
The website does make some information available free to the public, including its annual Super Bowl Ad Center, where it rates the commercials not only on how many times they are viewed, but on how much they are shared or discussed on social media.
The public website gets more than 5 million visits a month, mainly from mobile customers searching for TV ads across Google, Bing and Yahoo, Muller said.
“Anyone can look up any TV ad and discover actors, songs, products, basic airing data, agencies and lots of other metadata,” he said.
Some of the free reports include: Top 10 Most Engaging TV Ads (the top three spots are held by Supercell) and Top 10 Spenders in TV Advertising (No. 1 is Warner Bros., spending $30.7 million.)