Integrate, an important player in the Lead Gen domain and marketing campaign tools, has received a $ 4.25 million in funding from the Foundry Group. This is the first step in attracting considerable sums and forward-thinking implementation for Integrate.  Seth Levine, the managing partner of the Foundry Group, assesses the large need and desire for performance-based marketing that is currently being unmet, stating that Integrate capitalizes on that need.

Integrate’s services are aimed at both B2B and B2C types of business, combining online and offline advertising into a single media-buying dashboard and allowing  advertisers to create custom, performance-based campaigns for any specific customer demographic. These can utilize any variety of media – Internet, print, television, billboard and radio.  It mimics what Google has been striving towards for years now, though Google’s own efforts haven’t been so centralized, and lost traction in certain areas, namely radio.

Integrate’s model is based strictly on the performance of the campaign, and brands and retailers only pay for qualified leads, customers or inbound calls. A true marketplace, buyers (advertisers) and sellers (publishers) can choose to work together based on the thorough information provided by Integrate and can communicate with each other inside the platform.

“With Integrate, we saw the opportunity to level the playing field for performance marketing for brands and retailers. Our mission is to make it simple and effective for anyone – a small brand or a large retailer – to put together a multi-channel performance-based campaign,” said Jeremy Bloom, cofounder of Integrate.

A recent report presented earlier this month at the Wharton School of Business in Philadelphia demonstrates how cross-platform ads are playing out for online TV, specifically as it pertains to search.

Ken Wilbur, a marketing professor at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business asserts that ‘advertising on television changes what people search for’ and determined the use of more branded keywords and fewer generic keywords. The explanation lies in the power of  branded terms that outweigh generic terms. Yet advertising cannot trigger an increase the number of searches in a product category.

Additionally, a recent study done by Nielsen and Yahoo! concludes that three out of four Americans surf the internet while watching television, thus the integration of televisions and search advertising campaigns being of utmost importance.  Another important factor is the budget allocated for both TV advertising and online advertising, which should be carefully considered–the effect of TV advertising on consumers’ choice of branded keywords is about as large as its effect on sales.