Commentary

Using News As Data Is Worth At Least $6.4M

The cookie may still dominate, but new ways of targeting are springing up left and right, each more interesting than the last.

Perhaps no strategy is as unique -- or as old, depending on your perspective -- as Gagein’s.

The Silicon Valley-based start-up has technology that tracks news across the Web and tells B2B marketers which stories they should pay attention to. The tech “reads” the news to help marketers find prospects, gathering information about them and telling Gagein users when to reach out to prospects with something relevant, based on what's happening in the world today.

I haven’t seen the technology in action, but it appears to be an updated model of one of the oldest and most basic forms of gathering data: reading the news.

Some may consider it nothing more than a content marketing platform, but Gagein’s hyper-focus on news drew my attention. It also drew the attention of some investors. The company this week closed a $6.4 million Series A round of funding.

“Using artificial intelligence to find actionable news amid the clutter of information available on the Internet adds incredible value,” stated Shahid Ullah, COO of Afren Plc and a Gagein investor.

AI news gatherers, such as Google News, are not geared for marketers. While marketers have used Twitter or Facebook trends to plug their brand here and there, those are typically used for general promotions rather than one-to-one sales.

The other interesting angle here -- and one that definitely shows how this tech is suited for B2B marketers -- is that Gagein’s news crawler is simply tapping into a public well to gather data.

That’s immeasurably different than the other end of the spectrum, where you have B2C marketers going for personalization and holding first-party data so close to the chest that it has precipitated the ongoing transparency debate.

"News data" image from Shutterstock.

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