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Real estate advertising company Audience Town has announced seed funding of $2.1 million.
The investment was led by Wasatch Venture Partners and is intended to augment expansion and place additional emphasis on the development of its core software. To date, the company has secured $3.1 million.
Audience Town also provides advertising services for companies in moving and home services, collectively referring to its advertising targets as “movers.”
As with so many vendors within the real estate ecosystem, last year was good for the company. It grew by 300 percent, setting revenue records in the middle two quarters.
Ed Carey
Audience Town recently released a feature for agents and brokers to run high-end commercials on localized streaming media services. It also released a virtual home tour product.
“Audience Town has built the first advertising platform powered by proprietary data and designed to meet the needs of the real estate industry and brands targeting the home mover,” said Ed Carey, CEO of Audience Town, in the press release.
Audience Town’s digital ad campaigns do not use pixel-based retargeting, instead placing its value in something called programmatic advertising. Whereas pixels require first an ad target (home shopper/potential mover) to visit a website or interact with a pixel in some capacity, Audience Town’s tech dynamically processes volumes of web data to predict where a potential mover will end up on the internet. It then serves them advertisements at those locations.
More of a constant, real-time bidding premise, costs associated with programmatic placement can vary based on the website where the ad was served. However, accuracy is considered better because of the additional data that drives website selection, such as the makeup of previous audiences, page context, physical location and website authentication.
Scott Stettler, Managing Director of Wasatch Venture Partners, said in the release that moving is one of the most personal, financially challenging decision consumers make, so its important for service providers to be in front of movers as soon as possible.
“Audience Town has a unique product to solve for this, and we’re excited to be a strategic partner of their ongoing growth,” Stettler said.
Carey spoke to Inman in July 2019, early into the company’s tenure. “Retargeting is 10-year-old technology,” Carey said. “It’s table stakes and commoditized. But, it did get a lot of agents on the web advertising.”
Have a technology product you would like to discuss? Email Craig Rowe
Craig C. Rowe started in commercial real estate at the dawn of the dot-com boom, helping an array of commercial real estate companies fortify their online presence and analyze internal software decisions. He now helps agents with technology decisions and marketing through reviewing software and tech for Inman.
