BrandTotal Marketing Intelligence Platform Shines Light on “Dark Marketing,” Revealing Hidden Digital Marketing Strategies to Empower Brand Marketers

BrandTotal, a New York– and Tel Aviv-based company whose agile marketing platform harnesses artificial intelligence, cyber security techniques and data science to empower brand marketers with competitive data and actionable insights by revealing the digital marketing activities of their top competitors, announced the closing of a $6 million round of funding, bringing their total venture funding to $8 million.

International venture capital firm Flint Capital led the Series A funding round, which included:

• NHN Investment, owner of Naver Corp., operator of Line, the most popular messaging app in Japan and South Korea,
• One Way Ventures, a Boston-based venture fund led by Semyon Dukach and Eveline Buchatskiy, former Directors of Techstars in Boston.
• FJ Labs, led by Fabrice Grinda, who was recently named the #1 Most Successful Angel Investor in the world by Forbes, [August, 2018]

Glilot Capital Partners and Keshet Dick Clark Productions also joined the funding in early 2018. Both were participants in BrandTotal’s $2 million seed investment round, which closed July 2017. The Series A funding caps off an event filled summer for BrandTotal, announcing a partnership with Microsoft via Microsoft’s Dynamics 365, being selected to Oracle’s Startup Cloud Accelerator and having presented at Morgan Stanley’s prestigious Innovation Summit.

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Funds from the Series A Round will be used to expand sales, marketing and data science efforts via BrandTotal’s new offices in New York as well as internationally.

“The support from Flint Capital and our investment leaders has already created new growth opportunities for BrandTotal among Fortune 500 companies, by allowing us to optimize and expand the roll-out of our agile marketing platform,” says Alon Leibovich, CEO and co-founder of BrandTotal. “Our proprietary data shows that 85% of sponsored posts on Facebook are ‘dark posts,’ meaning they are targeted to specific users. There is a massive gap in marketing visibility across digital platforms and we are illuminating these programs to empower marketers with actionable competitive insights.”

“We are thrilled to put our support behind the outstanding management team at BrandTotal, a company that provides some of the world’s largest organizations with unique and invaluable insights into digital marketing—a space which is projected to approach $120 billion in spend by 2021 in the US according to Forrester Research,” says Sergey Gribov, Partner at Flint Capital.

Launched in June 2017, BrandTotal’s agile marketing intelligence platform is a SaaS-based solution that harnesses AI, cyber security techniques and data science to distill actionable insights. The technology was developed to provide brand marketers with valuable competitive intelligence about the digital marketing landscape within their industry. Through campaign aggregation, BrandTotal’s technology detects creatives across various digital channels and clusters them into campaigns for analysis. Using signal detection, the platform identifies trends and outliers between brands within the industry-wide competitive landscape.

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BrandTotal’s SaaS-based platform collects and consolidates both public and targeted “dark” posts from numerous paid media channels, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Amazon and display banners across the web. With a lack of transparency in the ever-evolving digital marketing ecosystem, the platform can reveal a brand’s opportunities and threats in real time, enabling marketers to become agile with a competitive edge.

The BrandTotal Agile Marketing Platform provides detailed reports and cross-platform competitive analytics to help quantify brand marketing initiatives, including:

• Target demographics
• Share of voice
• Advertising spend
• Creative assets
• Audience sentiment
• Active channels
• Engagement across multiple social platforms
• Organic content shares

BrandTotal uses advanced cyber security techniques and artificial intelligence to reverse-engineer digital marketing programs, enabling brand marketers to see and understand the strategies their competitors are using to drive digital marketing.

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With corporate marketing budgets increasingly shifting towards digital channels, hyper-targeted and personalized campaigns have become more popular and are inherently hidden from public view. Because digital marketing is targeted to individuals, the parts that can be seen in the open are just fragments of a larger strategy. There’s no way to know how competing companies are deploying their campaigns, who is seeing them, or how effective they are.

In July 2018, BrandTotal announced a partnership with Microsoft in which the tech giant will provide access to select features from its Agile Marketing Platform to Microsoft customers through Microsoft Dynamics 365.

In August 2018, BrandTotal was selected to participate in Oracle’s Startup Cloud Accelerator, a six-month partnership in which Oracle provides mentoring, access to technology, client and partner lists and other resources to the world’s most promising startups.

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