Ringleader Digital on Monday became the latest in a string of companies in the embryonic mobile advertising market to announce that it has attracted VC funding.
The New York City-based firm said it got a $6 million cash infusion primarily from W2 Group, a Waltham, Massachusetts-based holding company and investor in digital marketing firms.
Advertising on mobile phones has emerged very slowly in part because of technical and consumer acceptance challenges, but both investors and entrepreneurs are excited about the market's potential.
Two-year-old Ringleader, which recently changed its name from MoPhap, is the most recent of about a dozen VC-backed firms to either acquire institutional funding for the first time or to add to their existing investment.
Less than two weeks ago two Silicon Valley firms -- Ad Infuse, a San Francisco, California-based firm, got $12 million, while San Mateo, California-based Smaato received $3.5 million.
Other firms to receive funding recently include AdMob, which has received roughly $18 million; Millennial Media, which took $21.3 million; Amobee Media Systems, which took an undisclosed amount from Vodafone in November; and Quattro, which got $12.3 million in funding in September.
"VCs are following the fads and mobile advertising is the latest fad," said David Chamberlain, an analyst with In-Stat. "But investors are also generally attracted to the uniqueness of the cell phone as a target for advertising."
Data-enabled cell phones offer marketers almost all the benefits of PCs such as web access and email etc., but they also offer the benefits of mobility and a lot more data about the consumer.
But different standards, handsets, technologies, carriers policies, and consumer rejection have made mobile advertising technology difficult and expensive to deploy.
Ringleader attempts to mitigate the problem of disparate mobile technologies and standards by borrowing from online advertising, which went through some of the same lack of interoperability mobile faces today.
"Most of the mobile ad players today do a closed network model," said Bob Walczak, CEO of Ringleader. "We've opened that up and brought a third-party ad serving model, so our system can take ads from any network in the marketplace."
Investor W2 Group, which is building a stable of marketing-oriented companies, will seek synergies between Ringleader and some of its other properties which includes digital marketing, PR, and social media firms.
"As the market matures in the next couple of years I think Ringleader could harvest it big time," said Larry Weber, CEO of W2 Group. "I see huge synergies not just in mobile but in next-generation outdoor, PR, paid media, and health care as a vertical."