June 2013
1 post
April 2013
3 posts
Our Investment in SocialFlow
The team at kbs+ Ventures is excited to announce our investment in SocialFlow, a platform that is changing the way that brands engage users via social media. We participated in the company’s $10 MM Series B funding round which was announced today.
As Techcrunch notes:
The company now has solid traction in the enterprise, where brands like Walmart, Pepsi, Burberry and others are among the over 70 enterprise customers who have adopted SocialFlow’s technology. Its customers operate in a number of industries as well, including retail, automotive, consumer products, hospitality and more. Six of the ten largest media companies are actively using Cadence, the company notes.
At kbs+ Ventures, we focus heavily on identifying and investing in companies that leverage data in innovative ways across traditional and emerging ad stacks. SocialFlow turns billions of disaggregated pieces of social content into a predictive analytics solution for brands to manage how they deliver messages and engage with audiences across earned, owned and paid media.
Given that our team sits within an ad agency, we see and hear about how brands are leveraging social on a daily basis. From our vantage point, we believe that SocialFlow will be able to make a meaningful improvement in the lives of social marketers and we’re excited to partner with the company as it grows.
We trust that Missy, Frank and the entire SocialFlow team will continue pushing forward in innovative ways and would like to congratulate them on closing this round of funding.
March 2013
1 post
February 2013
3 posts
January 2013
1 post
Hiring: Venture Associate Intern (Winter/Spring)
We’re hiring a Venture Associate Intern (Winter-Spring 2013). Here’s the details.
Who we are
kbs+ Ventures is the early-stage investment arm of the marketing services agency kbs+. We invest in early-stage (Seed and Series A) entrepreneurs focusing on innovation in advertising and marketing technologies. More about kbs+ Ventures, our portfolio, our investment and acceleration philosophy, and our team is at http://kbsp.vc
Who we’re looking for
Venture Associate Intern to assist with identifying and assessing potential investments and creating and distributing external communications.
Roles and Responsibilities
- Assist in identifying and assessing potential investments
- Assist in creating thoughtful, analytical research and case studies about innovation in advertising and marketing technology for distribution throughout kbs+, our clients, our portfolio entrepreneurs, and the broader industry.
- Assist with Ventures external communications including research reports, newsletters, blogs and social media.
Skills and Requirements
- Background in digital advertising preferred; at the minimum, a desire to develop a deep understanding of marketing and advertising technology is required.
- Skills required include broad-based analytical skills, ability to understand and explain complex systems clearly through writing, and a passion for technology and entrepreneurship in general.
- MBA-level internship.
- This position is part-time (10 hours a week) from January 2013 to June 2013 and based in the office of the advertising agency kbs in Soho, New York, NY. Start ASAP.
Contact
Contact Taylor Davidson at tdavidson(at)kbsp.vc to discuss. Please send:
- A summary of your background and interest
- Links to your online presence (Twitter, LinkedIn, blog, etc.)
- A succinct point of view on what you think the most interesting digital advertising, marketing, or media company is, and why.
October 2012
3 posts
“…PlaceIQ’s Duncan McCall about his brand new case study that demonstrates 118% in-store sales lift for auto parts company Meguire’s (3M subsidiary) after applying precise location targeting. The campaign used PlaceIQ’s data to identify areas with high indexes of the desired user profile (auto enthusiast) and nearby Meguire’s locations. Rich media ads from Medialets were then displayed to capture user interest and provide nearest store locations. The result was not only sales lift, but a $1.31 return for every campaign dollar invested, a 2x engagement rate compared with Medialets’ benchmarks, and a 150% increase in response rates such as watching a video, finding closest store, or browsing products. “After analyzing sales from markets exposed, compared to control markets not targeted,” McCall said, “this real measurable retail ROI indicates the power of mobile audience targeting using location data.”
—Place Off: A Week in the Life of the Mobile Local Revolution | Street Fight
Intent Targeting Is The Answer For Yieldbot CEO Mendez →
adexchanger.com
What is a typical use case for Yieldbot products today?
Publishers’ business is based on traffic, page views. However, they have never had a monetization system that intelligently understands what attracted the intentions of that traffic on every single page view of that site.
We allow publishers to see their site through the lens of intent by resolving every page view to multiple keyword values. They are ranked similar to “quality score” in search. We bring that all together into our analytics package where publishers are able to see through the words and the intentions of their visitors what’s working and what’s not working.
We are able to understand at the URL level – the URL of the page is our atomic unit of data collection. We are looking every single referrer and every single visitor that comes to those pages serializing the data from their clickstreams and how they got there. Then seeing what happens when they leave. Resolving all that to keyword values.
September 2012
7 posts
Adaptly Talks: Facebook Exchange: What Does it Mean for Advertisers? →
talk.adaptly.com
Click here to download the full version.
On Thursday, September 13th Facebook announced that its real-time bidding platform, the Facebook Exchange, is finally leaving the beta stages. The Facebook Exchange introduces a new way to purchase Facebook ads. Essentially, the platform…
“Native Advertising is quite the buzzword these days. Native advertising, IMHO can be defined as advertising engagements (sometimes units) that takes place utilizing the technology and the platform on which it exists upon and is in the natural flow of how the user interacts with the platform. If these units, subject to be different on any platform, contain something standardized that could be transacted through RTB, then we’ll see some of these units flow into auction based inventory sources such as public and private exchanges. I think that for the short term, we’ll see marketers using retargeting and re-messaging against native advertising units to continue the marketing dialogue with the consumer as this is much easier to deploy and a quick win.”
—Darren Herman in AdExchanger talking about native advertising and RTB, How Does Native Advertising and Real-Time Bidding Meet?
“The 0-1 innovation is going to come from the social places in ways we cannot imagine today…”
—Stuck In A Rut of Incremental Innovation | Darren Herman
August 2012
1 post
“We target the location and not the user,” says PlaceIQ CEO Duncan McCall, describing the strategy of deriving probability from points on the map, rather than user behavior.”
—Data That Thinks ‘Big,’ But Acts Local | Street Fight
