Buddy Media Attracts World’s Top Brands With Facebook-Management Platform

social media, Software, funding

Arlene Weintraub 8/25/11

In February, the Facebook page for the popular snack brand Pretzel Crisps had drawn only 6,800 fans. So Jason Harty, director of field and interactive marketing for the brand, launched a campaign on Facebook offering a dollar-off coupon to anyone who became a fan. In two weeks, the fan base grew to 13,700 for Pretzel Crisps, which is made by Skillman, NJ-based Snack Factory. A few weeks later, in the middle of the night, Harty decided to sweeten the offer. With a few clicks, he revised the coupon to buy one bag, get one free—a $4 value. In 36 hours, Pretzel Crisps had 29,000 Facebook fans.

The software platform that allowed Harty to act on his midnight marketing whim is made by Buddy Media, a fast-growing, New York City company that was founded in 2007. The company has since amassed an impressive client list, which not only includes Snack Factory, but also Mattel, Aflac, Sony, Johnson Johnson, Discovery, and many more. On August 15, Buddy Media raised $54 million in a Series D funding round, bringing its total venture haul to $90 million.

Some members of the financial press estimated that the Series D round valued Buddy Media at a half-billion dollars. In an interview a week later at Buddy Media’s headquarters, the company’s co-founder and CEO Michael Lazerow declined to confirm the valuation estimate, except to say, “We didn’t say it was wrong.” Instead, he chose to focus on how the company will use the cash going forward. “We have to go global,” says Lazerow, a former journalist who founded the company with his wife, Kass, the company’s chief operating officer. “Only 25 percent of people on Facebook and Twitter are in the U.S. So we have brands telling us, ‘We need help.’ It’s a huge opportunity.”

The platform that Buddy Media is taking global is, in its simplest terms, a social-media content-management system. While it’s true that marketers can use Facebook’s own tools to publish basic fan pages and the like, Lazerow believed companies would need …Next Page »

Arlene Weintraub is the editor of Xconomy New York. She can be reached at aweintraub@xconomy.com and followed on Twitter @awjourn.

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Interactive Marketing Spend Will Near $77 Billion By 2016

By Shar VanBoskirk

By 2016, advertisers will spend $77 billion on interactive marketing – as much as they do on television today.  Search marketing, display advertising, mobile marketing, email marketing, and social media will grow to 35% of all advertising spend within the next five years.

What does this growth mean for you?

1)      Interactive media has gained legitimacy in the marketing mix. In past forecasts, we found that interactive budgets grew because of marketing experiments, or firms looking for lower-cost alternatives to traditional media. No more. The next five years of growth comes from bigger interactive teams spending sizably to bake emerging media into their strategies for creating rich customer relationships.

2)      Search’s share will shrink. Search marketing (paid search and SEO) will continue to own the largest portion of the interactive marketing pie. But its overall share will decline as marketers shift search spend into biddable display investments, mobile marketing, and even social media.

3)      Display media will rally. Bolstered by advances in audience targeting and bid-based buying approaches, advertisers will renew their love affair with display media. We expect display investments to grow as marketers apply display instead of search. And niche or remnant inventory sells for higher prices due to demand-driven pricing.

4)      Mobile spend will surpass email and social media – this year. Mobile has the steepest growth curve in our study; spend in mobile ads and search will pass that in email marketing or social media this year. Email actually paces at a healthy 10% compound annual growth rate over the next 10 years. But the rapid adoption of tablets and their associated new and pricey ad formats will bolster mobile marketing investment.

5)      Social media marketing will grows moderately. Our social media forecast includes money spent a) integrated social media campaigns – think advertising efforts that could not exist without social networks, like Facebook gifts, or sponsored conversations; b) with agencies to develop social assets; or c) to buy social media management technologies like a listening platform.  But none of these investments are actually very expensive. So even though marketer curiosity about social media remains high, social media marketing spend is comparatively conservative.

How does this growth resonate with your own budget plans. I’m sure you’ll want to review the full report for the data and detail behind each of the above headlines. And you can manipulate our detailed models through ForecastView.

Shar VanBoskirk is a Vice President and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, serving interactive marketing professionals. Follow her on twitter @SharVanBoskirk.

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