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Balihoo has just announced funding for its recently launched online search engine for advertisers. With an additional $4 million in the bank, Balihoo plans on augmenting its sales and marketing efforts towards the media buying and planning community. The funding was led by Boise-based venture capital firm Highway 12 Ventures with additional participation from existing investor Lacuna Capital.
After a few months of testing, Balihoo launched its full commercial version of centralized advertising solutions in late November. The principles behind Balihoo are to offer media buyers and sellers a quick way in which to determine the best ways in which to spend their advertising dollars. This consolidated and centralized approach to advertising placement could be an important one, especially as online social media shifts to present itself as a more appealing sector for advertisers, and other forms of media advertising are seeing a slowing down of dollars spent.
Surely the necessity of various types of media advertising differ amongst brands and products. And because of the major shifts occurring in advertisement needs, the shaping of networks and services that lend their tools to advertisers have become far more consolidated. This is in part due to the capabilities of web-based tools for collaborative efforts, saving, revising and accessing documents, finding talent and advertising in a more cost-effective manner. From the looks of Balihoo, this is the appeal the company is going for. With networks like News Corp creating their own advertising hubs to provide direct access, however, the middlemen of the industry will need to shift tactics as well.