Veritonic, the world’s first audio intelligence platform, announced that it has raised $3.2 million in new capital to build on its success in bringing an evidence-based approach to audio marketing. The round was led by Greycroft, with participation from Lerer Hippeau and Audible, an Amazon company. The new investors were joined by existing investor Newark Venture Partners, which led the previous round of funding.
With the addition of new funds, Veritonic is planning to hire top talent across the entire company with a focus on Data Science and Sales, as well as further expand its end-to-end audio measurement capabilities that allow marketers to capitalize on the massive opportunity in audio.
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Related, the firm has launched a new product, Veritonic Competitive Intelligence (VCI), which provides brands with a clear, regularly-updated view of how their competitors are marketing in audio, which initiatives are most effective, and how well they stack up. VCI adds a fundamental piece to the Veritonic platform’s comprehensive dataset, empowering marketers to answer every key question about the best way to use sound in everything from podcasts to streaming radio to sonic branding.
“We are excited to be a part of Veritonic’s continued growth and success,” said Alan Patricof, co-founder and Chairman of Greycroft. “I’m personally very passionate about the future of voice, a key part of the audio marketing equation, but obviously only one small part of what the Veritonic platform can measure. The ability for brands to understand how their different audio initiatives can drive recall, stickiness, brand awareness, and more — as well as how everything fits together — is hugely important in a highly-competitive consumer brand landscape.”
An “alerts feed,” which tips off platform clients to new activity in the audio market, is a central part of VCI. If, for example, a competitor brand launches a new ad campaign across podcasts, the client is instantly notified of the activity, which also includes a view of how that new audio campaign is faring. Every campaign and audio asset in the platform is assigned a Veritonic Audio Score — the only rating standard for audio marketing — which gauges each audio asset’s emotional resonance, ability to drive purchase, memorability, and more.
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Founded by CEO Scott Simonelli, COO Andrew Eisner, and CTO Kevin Marshall, pioneers in online testing and optimization, Veritonic was created to fill a critical gap in media and technology: the ability for marketers and others to make the same kind of data-driven decisions about audio creative as they do about other kinds of creative, where/when to advertise, targeting and more. The need is particularly blaring now as audio continues to explode, driven by everything from voice-technology innovation, to podcasting, to the fact that modern consumers — perpetually distracted and on-the-go — are more exposed to audio’s influence than ever before.
That influence has been felt deeply during the pandemic. Veritonic’s “Audio Logo Index,” an annual, competitive intelligence report (that preceded the new product release) analyzing which brands’ sonic identities resonate the most, examined the phenomenon in 2020. The report showed, among other things, that several brands’ audio ads — including Liberty Mutual Insurance and Home Depot — resonated more with consumers by actually diminishing their famous sonic identity to strike a more sensitive tone.
“We knew we needed to transform our audio identity and make it mean something more to our audiences within our COVID-19 advertising,” stated Jenna Lebel, Chief Marketing Officer of Liberty Mutual. “We wanted to convey our authentic empathy as a brand.”
“We’re incredibly excited to invest heavily in our platform and continue to develop innovative ways to help brands understand and quantify the best way to use sound, said Scott Simonelli, co-founder, and CEO of Veritonic. “The injection of this new capital, and the addition of this key, new capability, further cements our platform’s standing as the central touchpoint to every important insight about this space — the “data map” for audio marketing.”
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