It’s always heart-warm­ing for the job­bing art direc­tor and account man­ag­er to hear of an adver­tis­ing start­up that appears to be going from strength to strength. Sea­soned vet­er­ans hold­ing media jobs in Adland may recall ear­li­er expe­ri­ences of work­ing for adver­tis­ing star­tups with affec­tion – all that vibran­cy, hope and ambition.

Mar­keter-con­sumer engagement

All of these are pos­sessed in spades by Palo Alto-based start­up, Inad­co, the dig­i­tal agency that helps brands fash­ion more tar­get­ed and com­pelling adver­tis­ing cam­paigns with its “inten­tion-dri­ven Form Ads” prod­uct. Even the more sto­ical account man­agers will like this, as Form Ads dis­pens­es with dizzy­ing seas of splash pages and cum­ber­some URLs, inte­grat­ing native ads into an app or site’s con­tent. Con­sumers don’t need to leave the page or app they’re vis­it­ing and can eas­i­ly pro­vide basic infor­ma­tion to an advertiser.

Last month, it raised an impres­sive $11 mil­lion in Series B fund­ing, led by U.S. Ven­ture Part­ners (USVP). The agency’s exist­ing investor, Red­point Ven­tures (who led the ear­li­er $5 mil­lion Series A fund­ing round), also par­tic­i­pat­ed. Hard-head­ed account man­agers and cre­ative art direc­tors alike can’t but be impressed with such fund-rais­ing alacrity.

Orig­i­nal­ly focus­ing on dis­play ads upon emerg­ing from stealth in 2011, its CEO and founder James Walk­er says that search ads are now also includ­ed and social is in the pipeline.

Native, native, native

Inad­co was born before the native craze kicked in, but Walk­er is adamant that it’s a core fea­ture of all his company’s adver­tis­ing now because all its ads are designed to be inte­grat­ed seam­less­ly into the heart of user experience.

He said, “What’s cool about Inadco’s Form Ads is we take it a step fur­ther by enabling the con­sumer to com­plete their desired task with­out leav­ing the web­site or app they are visiting.”

It’s pay­ing off, too. The agency now has sev­er­al hun­dred big nation­al adver­tis­ers on its ros­ter, with names like Volk­swa­gen, 21^st Cen­tu­ry Auto Insur­ance and ADP amongst them.

USVP Part­ner Paul Mat­teuc­ci has now joined the board at Inad­co, and expressed his admi­ra­tion for the company’s plat­form which, he said, “helps mar­keters iden­ti­fy con­sumers with intent and cre­ate native ad units that enable two-way com­mu­ni­ca­tion and real-time data col­lec­tion in a way that we’ve nev­er seen before.”