Led by Chicago’s own New World Ventures, we recently raised $5 million, bringing our total funding to $8 million. Joining in the latest round were our previous investors TomorrowVentures, EPIC Ventures and the I2A Fund.
We’re thrilled to be backed by such a strong group of investors and plan to use the additional funding to continue to build out the next generation of marketing data infrastructure to support our growing roster of global enterprise clients, including well-known Chicago companies Starcom, Orbitz, and AccuQuote.
BrightTag’s vision is simple: To create a new layer of data control for marketers that enables a more agile online marketing ecosystem and more readily allows for continuous innovation. We aim to do that by simplifying the complexity that exists when marketers work with multiple digital service providers.
So what does that mean exactly? If you’ve spent any time in or around the digital marketing industry, you know that it is a crowded space filled with hundreds of innovative companies. In order to take advantage of the valuable services these companies offer, marketers must place the service provider’s enabling code onto their website. This is true even for something as fundamental as Google Analytics.
The purpose of these pieces of code is to gather information for of analytics (e.g. tracking which pages get the most traffic, A/B testing, segmentation, etc.), monetization (e.g. online ad campaigns, search and affiliate marketing, etc.) or to inject content by way of widgets or through third-party syndicated relationships. Looking back, the online ad industry didn’t anticipate the rapid growth of companies all vying for the marketer’s data. As the industry continues to grow and fragment, tag code has remained the means by which data is transferred between the parties, greatly impacting site performance, data control and the marketer’s own internal processes.
Consider the following:
We’re thrilled to be backed by such a strong group of investors and plan to use the additional funding to continue to build out the next generation of marketing data infrastructure to support our growing roster of global enterprise clients, including well-known Chicago companies Starcom, Orbitz, and AccuQuote.
BrightTag’s vision is simple: To create a new layer of data control for marketers that enables a more agile online marketing ecosystem and more readily allows for continuous innovation. We aim to do that by simplifying the complexity that exists when marketers work with multiple digital service providers.
So what does that mean exactly? If you’ve spent any time in or around the digital marketing industry, you know that it is a crowded space filled with hundreds of innovative companies. In order to take advantage of the valuable services these companies offer, marketers must place the service provider’s enabling code onto their website. This is true even for something as fundamental as Google Analytics.
The purpose of these pieces of code is to gather information for of analytics (e.g. tracking which pages get the most traffic, A/B testing, segmentation, etc.), monetization (e.g. online ad campaigns, search and affiliate marketing, etc.) or to inject content by way of widgets or through third-party syndicated relationships. Looking back, the online ad industry didn’t anticipate the rapid growth of companies all vying for the marketer’s data. As the industry continues to grow and fragment, tag code has remained the means by which data is transferred between the parties, greatly impacting site performance, data control and the marketer’s own internal processes.
Consider the following:
- Even the best designed and most efficient tags can impede site performance.
- Once a tag is placed on your site, data flows uncontrolled.
- For large marketers the number of tags placed on their sites can escalate into the hundreds, and usually involves special requests that distract IT resources from their core projects.
- Getting tag code placed (not to mentioned removed) can take days, weeks or even months, slowing the testing and adoption of the many innovative new offerings coming to market.
BrightTag helps remove these barriers to innovation. With the BrightTag platform in place, a marketer has fundamental control of the data gathered on their website along with maximum flexibility to work with the evolving digital marketing ecosystem in a highly flexible and transparent manner.
We realize we are setting out to improve the way an industry has shared data for 15+ years. This monumental undertaking to build a neutral and open connectivity and control platform requires superior technology and a highly scalable infrastructure so we are thankful our technology team led by Eric Lunt (co-founder of FeedBurner, one of the Web's most highly scaled and highly available data distribution platforms), is up to the challenge. He and his team are building something that some in the industry have said can’t be done. Shhh, let’s not tell them!
If we're successful, then the entire digital marketing ecosystem benefits. Marketers have control over their data, access to a unified data set, and “instant-on” capability. Digital marketing service providers can work seamlessly with their clients and integrate instantly. In the end, data ownership is in the right place, sites run faster and everyone is working with better data. The entire ecosystem wins.
We realize we are setting out to improve the way an industry has shared data for 15+ years. This monumental undertaking to build a neutral and open connectivity and control platform requires superior technology and a highly scalable infrastructure so we are thankful our technology team led by Eric Lunt (co-founder of FeedBurner, one of the Web's most highly scaled and highly available data distribution platforms), is up to the challenge. He and his team are building something that some in the industry have said can’t be done. Shhh, let’s not tell them!
If we're successful, then the entire digital marketing ecosystem benefits. Marketers have control over their data, access to a unified data set, and “instant-on” capability. Digital marketing service providers can work seamlessly with their clients and integrate instantly. In the end, data ownership is in the right place, sites run faster and everyone is working with better data. The entire ecosystem wins.
