Attention measurement vendor Adelaide keeps attracting the attention of big-name ad industry investors.
On Monday, Adelaide announced it raised $1.4 million as an extension of its seed funding round. The investment was led by Aperiam Ventures, the venture capital firm launched by MediaMath Founder Joe Zawadzki and Undertone Co-Founder Eric Franchi.
New investors included GOAL Ventures and Nishat Mehta, a former top executive at data and analytics firm IRI, with participation from previous investors BlueTree and Human Ventures.
Adelaide already used part of this latest cash injection to boost its valuation to $60 million ahead of an all-stock acquisition of Rita, an Amsterdam-based data marketplace with a focus on the EU.
That deal, also announced on Monday, will help support Adelaide’s media quality measurement capabilities, Adelaide Founder and CEO Marc Guldimann told AdExchanger.
Attention, not attribution
Rita’s platform offers users more control over and transparency into the behavioral data collected on them by Google, Amazon and Meta. Users opt into sharing information with Rita about what ads they’ve been exposed to on these platforms and whether they’ve taken some kind of action in response.
Adelaide will use Rita’s ad exposure and conversion data to train its model for assigning attention scores to media placements. In other words, Rita’s determination of whether an ad placement has led to a conversion will become a part of Adelaide’s attention score.
But while that might sound like Adelaide is getting into the attribution business, that’s not the case, Guldimann said. Adelaide sees Rita’s data set as a way to bolster its existing capabilities, he added, rather than as an opportunity to sell a measurement product for tying conversions to ad exposures.
Rita will continue to operate as an independent subsidiary of Adelaide, Guldimann said, meaning Rita’s clients will still be able to use it for insights.
Guldimann became well acquainted with the difficulty of launching an independent panel-based business in 2011 when he founded Enliken, a company with a similar offering to Rita’s. Enliken folded in 2014, and it’s not a business that Guldimann is interested in pursuing again.
In fact, Guldimann believes the attribution industry has grown over the years primarily due to advertiser concerns about ad inventory quality.
“The fixation on attribution is more of an artifact of broken currencies and a lack of understanding of media quality than anything else,” he said. “When advertisers have a much better picture of the quality of the media they’re buying, they become less reliant on attribution.”
Post-acquisition plans
Rita CEO John Arts will join Adelaide along with Rita’s team of five engineers and data scientists, bringing Adelaide’s headcount to nearly 80 people.
Adelaide plans to expand Rita’s offering beyond the EU, starting with the US. The plan is for Rita to be available for US users by this time next year, Guldimann said.
With the addition of the $1.4 million seed funding extension, Adelaide’s total raised to date is approximately $8 million, Guldimann said. It previously raised $2 million from angel investors in 2021 and announced $7 million in seed funding in 2022. However, Adelaide actually decided not to finish raising that round, Guldimann said, citing difficulties from market volatility around that time.
“We got profitable and the market got weird,” he said. “Why take the extra dilution if we didn’t need the money?”
Plotting the road map
Aperiam’s Zawadzki and Franchi are not the only ad industry heavy hitters to have invested in Adelaide.
Contributors to previous rounds include Moat Founder Jonah Goodhart; former MediaLink CEO Michael Kassan; former GroupM CEO Irwin Gotlieb; former Nielsen President of US Media Lynda Clarizio; and Human Ventures, the firm founded by former Fox ad exec Joe Marchese.
All of these investors bring their own expertise and have contributed advice on how to grow the business, Guldimann said. For example, Goodhart helped Adelaide build its attention measurement offering, and Marchese helped pitch it to ad agencies.
As far as the new investors go, Adelaide can tap into Mehta’s IRI experience and his connections with people on the analytics side of the ad industry as it looks to further integrate outcome data into its platform, such as via the Rita acquisition, Guldimann said.
Meanwhile, Zawadzki and Franchi are more focused on ad tech infrastructure, which complements Adelaide’s efforts to partner with buy-side platforms, Guldimann said. Currently, Adelaide data is available within several DSPs, including The Trade Desk and Google DV360, but the company is seeking deeper integrations as it looks to make its Attention Unit (AU) scoring an industry currency.
“It’s about operationalizing AU and making it easy to activate through programmatic pipes,” Guldimann said. “That’s Joe and Eric’s domain.”
Correction 8/20/24: This article originally listed TubeMogul Co-Founder Brett Wilson as an Adelaide investor. While Wilson did invest in Parsec, the company that Adelaide was spun out from, he is not an Adelaide investor.
