New advertising software automates ad-buying - and cuts out workers

Jeremy Bloom - former Olympic skier, Philadelphia Eagle, and nonprofit-foundation boss - has been raising millions for his next career: replacing corporate ad-purchase professionals with automatic ad-view and spend-tracking software.

Bloom's company, Integrate, said this week that it has raised $11 million from Comcast Ventures, cable-TV mogul John Malone's Liberty Global, and the Colorado-based Foundry Group. Foundry also invested $4.2 million in 2010.

Integrate says it helps advertisers mine today's complex media markets - in which Americans are split into many thousands of micro-audiences - by sorting the enormous piles of our browsing and shopping data collected by websites, media companies, and merchants and then using it to rank viewership and purchases that follow consumer exposure to ads.

The system replaces people with software.

"With traditional media buying, you need a ton of people," Bloom said. "We're helping them automate the entire process. We help them eliminate the human friction."

The firm's algorithms track today's "fragmented" video and online audiences, offering a "cross-channel" view of multiple ads that makes it easier to see what works, Comcast Ventures principal Sam Landman said in a statement.

Bloom and his business partner, Hart Cunningham, said they were using the new money to open New York and San Francisco offices for the Denver-based firm, which employs about 150.

Hart, a serial software-company founder, and Bloom, a Colorado native, met during Eagles training camp in Arizona in 2006 when they dated women who were best friends, Bloom said.

The dating was casual. The men developed a lasting business relationship.

Bloom, a receiver and fifth-round draft pick, lasted a season with the Eagles and was later released by the Pittsburgh Steelers. He briefly ran a nonprofit foundation, SeniorWish.org - a kind of Make-A-Wish for older people - "but I figured out nonprofits are not a good way to make a living."

He attended "an amazing partnership program" the NFL runs with the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, promoting business and investment careers for the many NFL athletes who don't make - or keep - enough to retire rich.

"I came out of there gung-ho about starting an Internet company," Bloom said. He called Hart at a fortunate time: "His previous business was winding down, and he wanted to start something new."

It's not about counting clicks anymore.

"We're moving away from just measuring viewer impressions, to see how many customers you are generating from those campaigns," Bloom said.

"Say you're Groupon. They care about how many people are signing on for their daily deals; they really care for the people who have purchased those deals."

Using the extensive databases that websites and merchants have developed to track customer spending, "we plug in and see, in real time, how many of the customers are buying. So if the advertiser is spending $1 million a month, we can direct that to publishers who are converting customers" to sales and profits "on a real-time basis."

He said that more than 1,000 advertisers were using the program, including Comcast, Microsoft, and Yahoo.

Foundry invested in Integrate two years ago. The firm's Seth Levine joined the Integrate board and pitched the company to Comcast Ventures. He said Integrate users "get a complete view of their performance ad spend, and can dynamically shift [their] spend from one form of marketing to another."