Persado Gets $15M Led By Bain To Persuade The Ad World To Turn To Their Persuasion Marketing Technology

Persado, an ad-tech spinoff of digital marketing firm Upstream that specialises in “persuasion marketing”, has picked up a round of $15 million, which it will use to establish a new headquarters in New York to add to its London base; invest in R&D; and persuade ad agencies and brands to use its technology to help sharpen their digital media efforts. Current customers already include Skype, Badoo, the mobile carrier TIM plus several other tier-one carriers that Persado says it cannot disclose. Bain Capital Ventures led the funding in this round.

As background, persuasion marketing technology, as conceptualized by Persado, works like this: a brand (or its media agency) creates a piece of marketing or an advertisement that is text-based, which can be email, SMS, display or search ad-based; the ad unit gets run through Persado’s algorithms, which have been developed to pinpoint certain criteria to make the ads more actionable and engaging (“applying mathematics to emotion, product and language” CEO Vratskides tells TechCrunch); and then the ad continues on its way to its originally intended destination.

The end results look something like this:

and like this:

Persado CEO and founder Vratskides, who was also the founder and CEO of Upstream, told TechCrunch that the company has created algorithms that crunch together lots of data on how well different types of ads perform. This information — a kind of big data play in itself — is then used to “read” the original text in the ads and effectively edit it to use more of the word and phrase cues that have proven successful in those past ads. This is not to say that the whole process is devoid of human interaction and is solely based on machine learning: Vratskides notes that people usher through initial ads from each client, although over time, Persado’s technology learns and increasingly “edits” content on its own.

The concept is another development in the area of ad-tech that provides customization that would have originally been the terrain of people: because of the sheer proliferation of digital ads on websites, mobile apps, emails, texts and more, that kind of role is becoming less feasible for a human to process each an every time. Others that work in a similar (but not the same) realm include OneSpot, which has a platform that automatically turns non-ad content into ads.

The predicament of too many digital ads and too few people on the ground to improve them is partly what attracted Bain to Persado. “The creation of the most effective marketing messages is a universal problem and a highly manual process for digital marketers today,” said Bain Capital Ventures partner Deepak Sindwani in a statement. “Persado solves this problem through its unique data science, software, and information service, systematically generating the best messages across all online marketing channels, for any product and any customer, at any time. We are excited to partner with Persado to pursue this enormous market opportunity and build the next great company in online marketing.”

Vratskides himself started the company out of what he called “frustration” over how so many of the ads he saw running through Upstream simply did not have what it took to really engage customers. “When it comes down to marketing messages that verbalize to consumers, these days there are just creative poeple who stare at the ceiling and come up with messages to convey offers,” he said. “What we offer is a way to sell with science.”

via TechCrunch http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/13/persado-gets-15m-led-by-bain-to-persuade-the-ad-world-to-turn-to-their-persuasion-marketing-technology/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29