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, 21st 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.”