Adcentricity closes $3 million finance deal

April 23, 2008 by Dave Haynes

The deal was cut a couple of months ago, but after all the due diligence stuff got done Adcentricity was able to announce Wednesday a $3 million series A equity financing that will help the founders pay down their tab at Toronto’s Spoke Club.

The great majority, however, will go to help expand the year-old Canadian company’s business development and advertising sales efforts in the United States.

The money, put together by Montreal-based Propulsion Ventures, will allow Adcentricity to “substantially increase its sales presence throughout North America, increase the depth of its network partnerships in its existing and new verticals, and invest in supporting research with partners and media / advertising Agencies,” according to a press release.

“There are tremendous growth opportunities in Digital OOH and we are expanding strategically to appeal to the increased demand from Brands and Agencies for scalable media opportunities in place based and retail environments, while investing strongly in our dedicated Digital OOH media sales efforts,” said Rob Gorrie, president of ADCENTRICITY.

“We are working in a truly great industry, which provides for unprecedented ‘hyper targeting’ of audiences on a large scale across North America. In the year since we launched, we have made major progress attracting Network partners to our service, introduced a robust end-to-end media platform, and made great in-roads in servicing the planning and buying market at the agency and advertiser level. The extra resources provided by Propulsion Ventures will only increase these areas as key strengths of ADCENTRICITY.”

The company has spent its first year writing a Web-based front-end planning tool and building up a roster of member networks in Canada and increasingly in the US, with a model that bears similarities to SeeSaw Networks. Though both companies say there are distinct differences, at the end of the day they are both rolling up advertising avails from large and small digital screen networks and selling aggregated media buys  to agencies and brands.

You wanna buy the university crowd in New England, an aggregator can provide the audience by spanning across venues that are part of multiple networks.

Gorrie has been spending most of his time lately in New York, getting the word out and building a sales team there. He also writes one of the better blogs in this space, with a focus on media and content.

Congratulations Rob and Jeff (Atley, co-founder) and to the rest of the team on King Street. Rob walked me  through a very deep PowerPoint on the concept about 18 months ago. It’s amazing it’s gone from there to here that quickly.

  1. Kris Matheson says:

    I guess we know who is stepping up for the next social! 40 year old Macallan all around!

    Kidding aside, Congratulations Rob and Jeff!

  2. […] in a transaction lead by Propulsion Ventures, a subsidiary of Telesystem.  Read More…   Adcentricity closes $3 million finance deal The company has spent its first year writing a Web-based front-end planning tool and building up a […]

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