A multi-million dollar investment will help inform advertisers about the most effective ways to use audio in their marketing campaigns. Veritonic, which provides data and insights about audio campaigns, says it has raised $3.2 million in new capital to expand its workforce in the areas of data science and sales and to expand its audio measurement capabilities.
The round was led by Greycroft with participation from venture capital fund Lerer Hippeau and Audible, the audiobooks subsidiary of tech behemoth Amazon. They join existing investor Newark Venture Partners, which led the previous round of funding.
Veritonic helps broadcasters, streaming audio services and advertisers understand which audio elements, such as voiceover selection, music, or audio branding, are resonating in their ads. Some clients include Entercom, iHeartMedia, Sirius XM, and Pandora Radio.
“We are excited to be a part of Veritonic’s continued growth and success,” Alan Patricof, co-founder and Chairman of Greycroft, said in the announcement. “I’m personally very passionate about the future of voice, and the team at Veritonic deeply understands how to use audio to drive recall, stickiness and brand awareness – which is hugely important in a highly-competitive consumer brand landscape,” he said.
How Competitors Stack Up
In addition to the new funding, the New York-based company says it is rolling out a new product to help brands understand how the audio campaigns of their competitors stack up. Branded as Veritonic Competitive Intelligence (VCI), the new offering provides clients with a regularly updated view of how their competitors are using audio to market and which initiatives are moving the needle. As part of the new service, VCI clients will get an alert when there is new audio ad activity in the market. For example, if a competing brand launches a new podcast ad campaign, the client is instantly informed of the activity and given a look at how the new audio campaign is working. Each audio asset digested into the data platform is given a Veritonic Audio Score which gauges its resonance, memorability, ability to drive purchase and other metrics,
Founded by CEO Scott Simonelli, COO Andrew Eisner and CTO Kevin Marshall, Veritonic says its mission is to give marketers and others the ability to make the same kind of data-driven decisions about audio creative as they do for other kinds of creative, along with insights on where and when to advertise, targeting and other variables.
Veritonic has for the last four years published an Audio Logo Index ranking the sonic signatures of top consumer brands. The report analyzes consumer response, including how memorable they are, if they’re correctly associated with the brand, emotional resonance and other criteria.
“We’re incredibly excited to invest heavily in our platform and continue to develop innovative ways to help brands understand and quantify the best way to use sound, Simonelli said. “The injection of this new capital, and the addition of this key, new capability, further cements our platform’s standing as the central touchpoint to every important insight about this space – the ‘data map’ for audio marketing.”