Social TV analytics company Bluefin Labs today announced that it has raised $12 million in a Series B round led by Time Warner Investments with the participation of the new investor SoftBank Capital and the return investors Redpoint Ventures and Lerer Ventures.
Bluefin Labs first introduced its analytics service through a private pilot program in May 2011 and quickly followed the launch of its flagship product, Bluefin Signals, in July 2011. Bluefin Signals is an analytical platform that analyzes and organizes social media conversations on US national television. Clients of Bluefin Signals use social data on TV shows and commercials to inform the purchase and sale of TV media. Clients are a mix of television networks, marketers and agencies, including CBS, Fox, Discovery Communications, MediaCom, MTV Networks, Starcom MediaVest Group and many others.
New funding will be used to accelerate the growth of Bluefin Labs’ sales and customer service efforts. The company will also continue to invest heavily in technology and R&D to lead further innovation in the field of social television analytics.
“We are witnessing a huge shift in consumer behavior, as people now naturally turn to social media to express their opinions about what they watch on television. Our technology therefore enables us to provide insights into consumer thinking,” said Deb Roy, co-founder and CEO of Bluefin Labs. “We continue to build on Bluefin’s services to provide enhanced data, enabling our clients to gain a better understanding of their audiences and target consumers. “That’s right.
Rachel Lam, Senior Vice President and Managing Director of Time Warner Investments will join the Board of Directors Mrs. Lam has gained extensive experience in the media and venture capital sectors and has played an instrumental role in financing companies in the digital media and ad technology sector.
“Bluefin Labs has created an innovative analytics platform that captures how people respond to television in real time,” she said. Oh, lam “There are significant implications for the television and advertising industries as companies learn to leverage social media and big data for competitive advantage. We look forward to further expanding this service and continuing the transformation of how the industry understands consumer engagement with TV shows, brands and commercials. “That’s right.
To date, Bluefin Signals has provided enterprise-quality data and analysis of social media responses to more than 346,000 individual television broadcasts across all day-to-day television and programming genres. Bluefin Signals helps media planners find locations on TV where brand receptivity and engagement is the highest. And for media buyers, data is a uniquely differentiated metric for making media investment decisions to achieve high “earned” social reach, in addition to paid TV exposure.
About Bluefin Laboratories
Bluefin Labs is a social television analytics company providing solutions to brand advertisers, advertising agencies, and TV networks. The technology and data of Bluefin Labs enables customers, for the first time, to tap into data on a scale that links people’s social media comments to the shows and commercials they watch on TV. Based in 15 years of cognitive science and machine learning research at the MIT Media Lab, Bluefin Labs was founded in 2008 by Deb Roy and Michael Fleischman and is headquartered in Cambridge, MA. Visit Bluefinlab Com
