ExtendTV, which helps TV stations sell digital programmatic advertising to local businesses, has secured additional funding and is changing its name to ZypMedia.
Sinclair Broadcast Group led the $4.4 million round of Series B funding. Sinclair also signed a long-term deal to work with ZypMedia in all of the 79 markets in which it runs stations. Sinclair had been conducting tests with ExtendTV in three markets.
ZypMedia plans to use the funding to expand its business nationwide, according to founder Mark Goldman.
Goldman said the new name was needed in part because the company was expanding its digital offerings to all online advertising from just video.
“Our new name, ZypMedia, is reflective of the speed with which we analyze available impressions and data sources to identify highly-targeted local audiences, and our comprehensive product offering which has expanded to encompass a full array of video and display advertising solutions across desktop, mobile and connected TV apps,” he said. “This infusion of capital gives us the resources to scale our business and provide these capabilities to local advertisers from coast-to-coast.”
Goldman said that in addition to Sinclair the company has also been working with stations owned by Raycom, Morgan Murphy and Granite.
“Local businesses are starting to embrace the power of Big Data and programmatic media buying in a big way and this has led to an explosion of growth in our industry since the beginning of 2015,” Rob Weisbord, chief operating officer of Sinclair’s digital group, said. “After testing a number of different solutions, it was clear that the ZypMedia platform produced superior results for our clients and their level of service was widely praised by our team.”
Weisbord will be joining ZypMedia’s board of directors.
In tests, stations found that the average client was spending 30% more with the station when the ExtendTV platform was bundled in.
(Photo via Ervins Strauhmanis's Flickr. Image taken on Sept. 19, 2014 and used per Creative Commons 2.0 license. The photo was cropped to fit 3x4 aspect ratio.)
