Integrated Media Measurement, the Silicon Valley start-up company that wants to make advertising more efficient by following you around -- tracking everything you listen to every day -- has raised $25 million more from advertising giant WPP.
IMMI, as it is known, gives cellphones to volunteers, equipped with a recording device built inside to track what ads they are hearing and seeing wherever they go. It has already learned a few things, including that people who play Halo3 tend to go to movies more frequently than the general population. See chart below.
We wrote about the company last year, after the four-year-old San Mateo, Calif., company emerged with $14 million in backing from Silicon Valley venture firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson and others.
However, WPP, the latest investor, is the world's second largest advertising conglomerate, and has made several aggressive moves lately to embrace new technologies to improve measurement of advertising success -- something that's considered crucial for WPP to please its large advertising/marketing clients. (See our coverage of WPP's recent investments and acquisitions).
The phone captures 10 seconds of audio from its surroundings every half-minute, detecting what people are listening too, whether it is a TV program, radio, digital video recorder or even a sporting event or concert. IMMI then uses acoustic matching technology to filter through these snippets comparing them with samples of the media being measured. IMMI also says it can track whether people make retail purchases after viewing or hearing an ad.
By the way, it has a bluetooth technology called Beacon -- remember that name from anywhere? :-) -- which beams its findings to a device in a user's home to maker sure it can track everything they hear in their home, distinguishing it from outside.
