Sponsorships are a multibillion-dollar industry. But data on sponsorships, like who’s sponsoring who, can be tough to come by because of the various forms they take — and channels on which those sponsorships take place (think not only websites and social media posts but also physical signage and even sports team jerseys). For both brands and the recipients of sponsorships, the lack of data presents a challenge. Brands don’t always know how much to charge sponsors, while sponsors aren’t consistently aware of sponsorship deals currently in place.
Frustrated by the sponsorship space’s opaqueness, Bob Lynch, the former VP of corporate partnerships for the Miami Dolphins, in 2017 founded SponsorUnited, a software-as-a-service platform that provides analytics data on the sponsorship industry. SponsorUnited claims to track over a million sponsorships across 250,000 brands, including every U.S.-based major league sports team.
“When I joined the Miami Dolphins after a decade in media, I immediately realized there was significant complexity and a lack of transparency and standardization within sponsorships, making it hard for brands and teams to optimally partner,” Lynch told TechCrunch in an email interview. “Noticing a similar trend in the NBA and arena events while with the Brooklyn Nets, I realized that if you could democratize access to previously inaccessible sponsorship deal data that the entire industry would want access to it.”
Lynch says that SponsorUnited is serving roughly 2,900 brands and properties, including Fortune 500 firms, talent and brand agencies and media companies — and investors seem pleased with the growth so far. SponsorUnited today closed a $35 million Series A funding round led by Spectrum Equity at a postmoney valuation “north of” $100 million. Paired with previous investments from Milwaukee Bucks owner Marc Lasry and San Diego Padres co-owner Ron Fowler, the infusion brings the startup’s total raised to $38.6 million.
“Up to this point, SponsorUnited had raised minimal capital, preferring to stay lean while building our data capture infrastructure and platform,” Lynch said. “But as we’ve gained critical mass beyond properties (e.g., teams and events) with brands, media, agencies and international expansion, we saw an opportunity to further accelerate growth by automating and scaling valuable data.”
Lynch describes SponsorUnited as “the Bloomberg terminal of marketing partnerships.” It’s essentially a search layer on top of a database of sports, esports, music, entertainment and media sponsorship deals, brands and properties. SponsorUnited acquires all the data directly without tapping into third-party sources, and it serves it in a way that allows companies to combine it with other data around sponsorship, including internal spend, return on investment and engagement.
A cursory Google search reveals several companies attempting to solve the same problem as SponsorUnited. There’s GlobalData, the sports-focused SportBusiness and SponsorPitch, to name a few. When asked about these rivals and others, Lynch pointed out that SponsorUnited tracks more categories of sponsorships than most and has invested heavily in its tech stack, which uses both automated and manual methods to compile sponsorship data.
“We have cultivated, refreshed, and expanded a vast repository of information — over five million data points on more than 500 asset types,” Lynch said. “We continue to invest in technology to scale and replicate the processes by which sponsorship data is tracked.”
So what’s next for SponsorUnited? Lynch says he’s tracking trends like sponsorships in the metaverse (to the extent they’re a thing), college athlete deals enabled by last year’s Supreme Court decision, and TikTok’s growing reach with younger audiences. The pandemic was and continues to be a boon for SponsorUnited, he says, as marketing organizations seek to track how deals shift from live events to digital.
In potentially good news for SponsorUnited, a 2021 survey from Caravel Marketing found that 52% of corporations planned to increase their budgets for sports team sponsorships in 2022, with only 16% projecting a decrease in spending. Lynch makes the case that these spenders will be inclined to subscribe to SponsorUnited’s services even if the economy ultimately takes a dip; when budgets tighten, it becomes imperative to discover the right partnerships and “optimize” current sponsorships, he asserts.
“The complexity and number of marketing assets and platforms being bought and sold in this industry is rising at an exponential pace,” Lynch said. “Our data provides valuable insights not only to IT but across the C-suite — chief marketing officers, chief revenue officers, chief customer officers and others.”
Stamford, Connecticut–based SponsorUnited — which isn’t revealing revenue figures — expects to have 100 employees by the end of the year, Lynch added.
SponsorUnited secures $35M investment to build out its database of brand sponsorships by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
SponsorUnited secures $35M investment to build out its database of brand sponsorships
Архив рубрики: Marketing
Regie secures $10M to generate marketing copy using AI
Regie.ai, a startup using OpenAI’s GPT-3 text-generating system to create sales and marketing content for brands, today announced that it raised $10 million in Series A funding led by Scale Venture Partners with participation from Foundation Capital, South Park Commons, Day One Ventures and prominent angel investors. The fresh investment comes as VCs see a growing opportunity in AI-powered, copy-generating adtech companies, whose tech promises to save time while potentially increasing personalization.
Regie was founded in 2020 by Matt Millen and Srinath Sridhar. Previously a software engineer at Google and Meta, Sridhar is a data scientist by trade, having developed enterprise-scale AI systems that detect duplicate images and rank search results. Millen was formerly a VP at T-Mobile, leading the national sales teams (e.g., strategic accounts and public sector).
With Regie, Sridhar says he and Millen aimed to create a way for companies to communicate with their customers via channels like email, social media, text, podcasts, online advertising and more. Because companies have so many platforms and mediums at their disposal to speak with customers, he notes, it can be a challenge for content marketers to produce continuously compelling content to reach their customers.
“The way content is getting generated has fundamentally changed,” Sridhar told TechCrunch in an email interview. “Marketers and copywriters working in the enterprise … increasingly [need] to produce and manage content and content workflows at scale.”
Regie uses GPT-3 to power its service — the same GPT-3 that can generate poetry, prose and academic papers. But it’s a “flavor” of GPT-3 fine-tuned on a training data set of roughly 20,000 sales sequences (the series of steps to convert prospects into paying customers) and nearly 100 million sales emails. Also in the mix are custom language systems built by Regie to reflect brands and their messaging, designed to be integrated with existing sale platforms like Outreach, HubSpot, and Salesloft.
Image Credits: Regie
Lest the systems spew problematic language, Regie says that every system goes through “human curation” and vetting before being released. The startup also claims to train the systems on “inclusive” language and test them for biases, like bias against certain demographic groups.
Customers can use Regie to generate original, optimized-for-search-engines content or create custom sales sequences. The platform also offers blog- and social-media-post-authoring tools for personalizing messages, as well as a Chrome extension that analyzes the “quality” of emails that customers send — and optionally rewrites the text.
“Generative AI is completely disrupting the way content is created today. The biggest competitors of Regie would be the large content authoring and management platforms that will be completely redesigned AI first going forward,” Sridhar said confidently. “For example, Adobe’s suite of products including Acrobat, Illustrator, Photoshop, now Figma as well as Adobe Experience Cloud will start to get outdated as Regie continues to build on an intelligent content creation and management platform for the enterprise.”
More immediately, Regie competes with vendors like Jasper, Phrasee, Copysmith and Copy.ai — all of which tap AI to generate bespoke marketing copy. But Sridhar argues that Regie is a more vertical platform that caters to go-to-market teams in the enterprise while combining text, images and workflows into a single glass pane.
“Generative AI is such a paradigm shift that not only productivity and top-line of companies will go up as a result, but the bottom line will also go down simultaneously. There are very few products that can improve both sides of that financial equation,” Sridhar continued. “So if a company wants to reduce costs because they want to assimilate sales tools, or reduce outsourced writing while simultaneously increasing revenue, Regie can do that. If you are an outsourced marketing agency looking to retain more customers and efficiently generate content at scale, Regie can definitely do that for agencies as well.”
The company currently has more than 70 software-as-a-service customers on annual contracts, including AT&T, Sophos, Okta and Crunchbase. Sridhar didn’t reveal revenue but said that he expects the 25-person company to grow “meaningfully” this year.
“This is a revolutionary new field. And as always, adoption will require educating the users,” Sridhar said. “It is clear to us as practitioners that the world has changed. But it will take time for others to get their hands dirty and convince themselves that this is happening — and that it is a very positive development. So we have to be patient in educating the industry. We also have to show that content quality isn’t compromised and that it can perform better and be maintained more consistently with the strategic application of AI.”
To date, Regie has raised $14.8 million.
Regie secures $10M to generate marketing copy using AI by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch
Regie secures $10M to generate marketing copy using AI