Nimble platform eases innovation for data-driven online clients including Orbitz, Starcom and Bluefly
CHICAGO – BrightTag Inc, an innovative technology platform provider for the digital marketing industry, announced it has raised an additional $5 million, bringing total funding to $8 million. The round was led by New World Ventures, which was joined by previous investors TomorrowVentures, EPIC Ventures and the I2A Fund.
The additional funding will further accelerate the company’s strong sales trajectory and support its 30 plus enterprise clients across hundreds of websites globally. Companies like Orbitz are deploying BrightTag across every site globally to smooth the innovation process and give their marketing and IT teams the control they require when working with their many marketing partners. Additional clients include Starcom MediaVest Group, Bluefly, Inc. and AccuQuote.
Today’s digital marketing model requires companies to integrate complex third-party code on their website, which impedes site performance, slows innovation and creates privacy concerns. BrightTag’s platform solves these industry-wide challenges by offering the marketer fundamental control of the data gathered on their website and maximum flexibility to work with the constantly evolving digital marketing ecosystem in a highly flexible and transparent manner.
“Think of BrightTag as ‘data Switzerland’,” said Mike Sands, BrightTag’s CEO. “We help everyone in the ecosystem do better work with better data. Our neutral and open connectivity platform ensures marketers have complete command over their first-party data, while gaining the flexibility to connect with any service that requires client data access.”
Leading ecommerce and retail companies doing business with BrightTag today point to compelling efficiency and performance results realized in days, not months. In addition, marketers gain access to a unified data set and “instant-on” capability with new marketing technologies.
“The caliber of ecommerce clients BrightTag has attracted speaks volumes about the promise of this platform and the company’s ability to execute,” said Matt McCall, partner at New World Ventures and the lead investor in BrightTag’s latest round. “BrightTag’s customers spend hundreds of millions online annually and now they have the freedom to make updates to their marketing programs in seconds, without involving IT resources or incurring time delays. It’s ‘innovation on demand’ and that drives ROI.”
One of the unique features of the BrightTag platform is its ability to facilitate direct connections between a marketer’s website and its chosen marketing partners using a cloud-based approach that eliminates the need to put 3rd party tags directly on a client site. This helps BrightTag’s customers improve the performance and reliability of their websites while increasing their ability to leverage data in marketing efforts. Importantly, BrightTag clients can monitor in real-time all the data they have chosen to share, know where that data is going and who is using it.
“We were one of the first companies to integrate with BrightTag, as part of our core mission to provide a seamless experience for marketers,” said Joe Zawadzki, CEO of MediaMath. “Interoperability with BrightTag allows us to focus on our strengths of driving brand and direct response lift in a turnkey way for mutual clients.”
BrightTag’s cloud-based data delivery is also helping marketing service providers integrate instantly with their website clients.
“BrightTag is tackling one of our industry’s biggest and most difficult challenges – removing the friction that exists between the various digital marketing participants and making the entire process faster and more transparent,” said Key Compton, CEO of XGraph. “We are in the business of connecting audiences and see a tremendous amount of value integrating with technology providers who understand both our challenges and those our clients face, and these guys get it. BrightTag is truly innovative.”
Sands concluded, “BrightTag’s vision is to enable a more agile world based on continuous innovation by simplifying the complexity that exists when marketers work with multiple digital service providers.”
About BrightTag
BrightTag is redefining the way data is collected and shared across the digital marketing ecosystem. With BrightTag, marketers have complete ownership and control of data gathered on their websites combined with freedom and flexibility to innovate by working with any third-party digital services provider. The company’s cloud-based integration platform provides a connectivity layer between first-party data and the marketing and analytics services supporting the site. BrightTag’s clients include many of the world’s top brands and hundreds of online marketing and analytics providers have integrated with the platform. Headquartered in Chicago, BrightTag is funded by New World Ventures, TomorrowVentures, EPIC Ventures and I2A Fund. For more information, visit www.brighttag.com.
