The RGM Group has been helping premium brand advertisers to reach the rich people through online advertising. The business of targeting the rich can be quite lucrative. The Venice, Calif.-based company is profitable and has grown up on its own to a stage where it is ready to take off. And for the purpose it has raised $21 million in private equity and hired a new chief executive to lead the company to the next level. The new CEO is none other than Kurt Johnson who has earlier led FastClick and ValueClick. The founder of the company, Kamran Razavi has stepped aside but will remain on the board as the Chief Strategy Officer.
Riordan Lewis & Haden Equity Partners Have Provided the Funding
The RGM Group has raised a funding for the first time. New Century Capital Partners helped the company raise the funding from Riordan Lewis & Haden Equity Partners. Razavi sees this as a transition phase for the company for which he had been preparing himself. For scaling up the company it was necessary to bring in someone with the expertise and right skills. The company already has within its reach almost 155 online consumers. This funding will be used primarily to accelerate its national sales, creative, product and technology development efforts. The process will see it doubling its headcount within a year. Its area of focus will be the New York metro market for which they have opened a new office in the city.
RGM Provides Integrated Brand Advertising Solutions
RGM was founded in 2004 and has grown on its own steam to become a large digital media company. Over the years it has created a large client base that includes hundreds of premium brands and ad agencies. Big names like Jaguar, American Express and Sony vouch for the services provided by RGM. J. Christopher Lewis, the Managing Director of RLH who have funded RGM, believes that the digital media industry has grown very rapidly in the last few years and that RGM is positioned strategically to deliver the highest quality integrated brand advertising solutions. The funding that they have provided will go a long way in enhancing and broadening the company’s unique platform.
RGM Has Three Distinct Divisions
RGM has created three distinct divisions to service its wide range of clients. RGM Alliance is a premium ad network consisting of 300 publications which are vertically focused. Its portfolio includes some niche sites like Digital Trends, ChaCha, and Urbanspoon apart from Frommer’s, Men’s Fitness, and SmartMoney. It boasts of 8 billion page views in a month and has a reach of 144 million US consumers. The industry experts and analysts admit that RGM is the No. 1 Fashion channel. The other division is RGM Exclusive which caters to premium publishers and provides exclusive media representations and creates unique and custom ad integrations for advertisers. There is a separate division for handling all the creative ad work and is predictably called RGM Creative. The task is cut out for the new CEO Johnson. He considers it a rare opportunity to be able to lead the company at this stage. He is confident that under his leadership the company would be able to deliver an expanding array of products to the market at much greater scale. However the company will have to compete hard with the other well entrenched players like Glam Media, Travel Ad Network, and Conde Naste Digital.
Via: venturebeat
