On Tuesday, tag management firm TagMan announced that it had closed $2+ million in Series A investment led by venture capital firm Greycroft Partners. TagMan founder and CEO Paul Cook said in the release, “We will put the new funding to immediate use in releasing version 3 of our technology, building out our infrastructure to support the continuing flow of new, enterprise e-commerce clients.” Read the release.
Cook discussed the capital raise and industry trends.
AdExchanger.com: Your last funding round you received $1.3 million. This time -about a year later – you received $2.1 million. How will utilization of the funds differ from a year ago?
PC: 2010 was an outstanding year for TagMan with both tag management and attribution high on the agenda as companies struggled to implement and evaluate the range of new marketing opportunities created by search re-messaging and RTB. The year ended with a number of clients wanting to roll-out TagMan beyond Europe and North America. The funds we raised a year ago have enabled us to make a number of key hires as well as open the US office. This additional funding will be used to support the expansion of TagMan services into Asia, allowing us to offer real-time attribution reporting and tag management globally. However, our focus in 2011 will continue to be on North America and both iNovia and Greycroft have great track records and contacts in the online ad space.
How does regulation around online consumer privacy affect TagMan’s business?
The proposed new privacy regulations highlight the need for a better way to manage tags. Tags are at the heart of online data sharing and companies need to have complete visibility over what tags they have on which pages in order to ensure compliance. TagMan clients can also allow consumers to set their privacy preferences individually so that tags are served according to those privacy preferences. This enables opt-out at the source, whereas currently consumers have to opt-out with each third-party individually.
What’s your expectation for the non-executive appointments to TagMan’s board?
The experience and connections of our new board members will be a terrific boost in terms of sales momentum and strategy. Seth Brody knows the online travel business inside out having been GM of Orbitz before joining APAX Capital while John Taysom was an early stage investor in Advertising.com and Yahoo, where he also sat on the board. Shaun Gregory has a phenomenal track record for building global teams from scratch and terrific experience on the mobile advertising side and currently heads up the media division for one of Europe’s largest mobile network operators, Telefonica O2. With more than half the board based in the US, TagMan’s board reflects the global nature of our business.
By John Ebbert
