Barometer Secures $2.25M to Expand Brand Protection and Contextual Targeting for Podcasts | ad exchanger
Summary
Although the IAB predicts that podcast advertising revenue will exceed $4 billion by 2024 (up from roughly $1 billion just two years ago), some brands are wary of monetizing a medium often associated with controversial user-generated content.Barometer, a startup that specializes in media quality and brand safety measurement for digital audio, is striving to help advertisers get more comfortable with podcast advertising.On Tuesday, Barometer announced its latest seed funding round of $2.25 million, bringing the companys total raised through 2022 to nearly $4.2 million.The round, the first of which closed in January and the second in March, was led by Knoll Ventures, BDMI and HearstLab, an investment fund created by Hearst Corporation to fund women-led tech startups . Several of Barometers angel investors also contributed, including tech entrepreneur Chris Kloss.CEO and co-founder Tamara Zubaty said Barometer plans to use the funds to expand its direct sales and engineering teams and invest in R&D for its brand protection platform and its new contextual offering.Barometers core offering is its Brand Integrity Cloud, which uses AI models to analyze podcast transcripts for content and sentiment. Advertisers can also rate podcasts based on the hosts Oxford Road Media Roundtable rating.Barometer recently released a contextual targeting tool that allows advertisers to apply the IABs content categorization to group podcasts into private market deals based on shared contextual signals.Zubaiti said the company plans to add more comprehensive targeting functionality and campaign personalization to both platforms, such as giving advertisers the ability to set different tolerance levels for profanity versus comedy podcasts within news content.The next step is to make contextual signals available in the bidstream to set the barometric platform for eventual growth in open-web programmatic spending on digital audio, Zubayti said.Less than 2% of podcast ads are sold on a real-time bidding exchange, she said, but thats something we think is clearly going to change.To that end, Barometer is eyeing more demand-side tech partnerships, including major players like audio specialist DSP AudioHook and The Trade Desk.The Trade Desk is less focused on audio, but we are on their roadmap to integrate with Rails like IAS, Moat, and DoubleVerify, Zubayti said. In this way, it hopes to avoid concerns about third-party technology vendors scraping and packaging IP into relevant segments to sell to advertisers.If its a public RSS feed, we dont need anyones permission, Zubaiti said. And with more engineers on board, Zubatie said the company will be able to grow the foreign language parsing capabilities of its platform, with the end goal of going fully global.