Inventure and Almi invest in Swedish ad targeting company Glimr

    The Digital ad market is growing rapidly, but the ads aren’t always targeted in the most efficient way. As a consumer, receiving weirdly targeted ads is extremely confusing – and from brands’ perspective reaching the wrong people gets quickly costly.

    To support improving brand targeting, Finnish Inventure and Swedish Almi published that they are investing together in Glimr. Ad targeting startup Glimr, accelerated by Techstars London in 2014, has already gained great traction from major Nordic publishers and global brands in helping them to build one-to-one relationships with their customers.

    Glimr, working in online-to-offline space, aims on improving targeting brands to consumers using offline data from stores. By using beacon technology and GPS-tracking, they enable that the brands can stay in touch with their customers even when they have left the store. By dropping an “offline cookie”, the offline world is combined with an online experience – so the use of the online cookies from desktops are now enabled to be used also offline with the help of smartphones.

    Online-to-offline gets big

    Using customer data to improve targeting advertisements has been a hot topic for publishers mainly focusing on the actions of Facebook and Google. International media group Schibsted is one of Glimr’s first major publisher customers, who collects rich collectual data from their users based on their physical location.

    “This information now allows publishers like Schibsted to present their brands with enhanced audience targeting previously unheard of in marketing world. This leads to higher conversions, improved user experience, stronger brands and higher ad-prices”, says Robert Hedberg, CEO and co-founder of Glimr.

    Timo Tirkkonen, Partner at Inventure, says that believe they see online-to-offline as one of the hottest spaces within the next 5 years. A great proof of that is, that brands like McDonalds, Coop, Unilever and Unibet have also been using Glimr’s audience targeting. The demand in the digital ad market is strong and growth is expected also in mobile ads segment – It has been estimated to grow to 127 billion USD by 2017.