Although brands invest more than $200 billion in television ads every year, they lack access to many of the spending optimization capabilities that are available on social media and other online marketing channels. A Scottish startup called TVSquared Inc. is working to bridge the gap.

Its efforts received a boost today in the form of a $6.5 million financing round from local fund West Coast Capital and the Scottish Investment Bank. TVSquared will use the cash to broaden the adoption of its cloud-based analytics platform, which promises to help advertisers run their TV campaigns more efficiently.

At the core of the service is a ratings calculating engine that filters out seasonal changes and other external factors to produce more accurate viewership estimates than the static models historically used for the task. From there, built-in machine learning algorithms can measure the impact of a company’s commercials by analyzing the online reaction after each airing. TVSquared claims that its approach enables marketers to identify the best times to run their ads and measure how a campaign affects brand awareness over an extended period of time.

The startup provides several ways of consuming the data produced by its service. A brand can either pull the information into a third party analytics system via a built-in programming interface, or use TVSquared’s three native analytics tools to assess the performance of commercials directly on its platform.

The first component of the lineup is Advantage, a monitoring engine that offers “same-day” information about campaign effectiveness to let marketers quickly make tweaks if there’s need for improvement. It’s complemented by a tool called Predict that provides the ability to find ways of increased the long-term return on TV advertising and plan out future media buys. Finally, there’s Halo, which is designed to help brands measure the business impact of campaigns.

TVSquared said its platform is used by more than 360 organizations across 50 countries to optimize their TV advertising. The startup claims that clients on average see a 25 percent improvement in the cost-efficiency of campaigns while increasing viewer conversion by 30 percent.

Image courtesy of TVSquared