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Advertising - Monday, August 27, 2007

Federated Media Raises $4.5M In Series B

The a:c's ad representation firm FM Publishing has raised $4.5M in Series B funding from its prior investors - JPMorgan Partners and Omidyar Network, says PEHub. Given our ties to FM, we field plenty of questions from other publishers and other ad networks on our opinions of FM. In general we think the company is off to a very strong start. It's very difficult for an ad network startup to get a balance of strong publishers and advertisers. All in all, Federated has pulled off the balance well only losing a handful of publishers since it launched.

+ Solid payouts. Unless you are going to hire your own ad sales force, we don't know of another ad network that is able to reward its publishers as well as Federated can.

+ Interesting campaigns. For advertisers Federated has done some clever campaigns that we think provide hard to quantify branding bonuses. For sure there have been some controversies over at least one campaign that perhaps had bloggers go too far in connecting their editorial voices to paying advertisers. But you can't fault FM for trying go to work with advertisers to try some new angles on the same old banner ad concept.

+ Perhaps the only topics that we can go negative on are that by FM's own admission they skew their attention to their very largest publishers (who doesn't) and their payment policies are a bit unorthodox.

View - FM site