French adtech claims to be a pioneer in social publishing, which involves relying on the reputation of premium publishers to improve the results of social ads campaigns.
Mediads, a French social publishing platform, announced on May 19 that it had raised 3 million euros from Seventure Partners, 404 Ventures and business angels. The money will be used for the commercial development of adtech in the United States.
This is the very first fundraising of Mediads which declares to be profitable and in annual growth of 100% for three years. The company claims to be a pioneer in social publishing technology, a niche explored by premium publishers since 2023 in France. Among the “250 exclusive media partner brands around the world” of Mediads, we can cite in France the brands of the Figaro group, Brut, Euronews, Futura and 20 Minutes.
In the United States, where campaigns are already live, the platform collaborates in particular with the Ziff Davis group (Mashable, CNET, ZDNET and PC Mag, among others), Entrepreneur.com, Time Out and Prisa Media for the English-language editions of El País and As. “Certain European advertisers use Mediads to optimize the ROI of their campaigns in the United States. The fundraising gives us the means to industrialize this presence and attack the American market directly, from both sides of the ecosystem,” Stéphane Labrouche, co-founder of Mediads, told JDN.
The principle at the heart of social publishing (also known as “social amplification”) is to offer advertisers the endorsement of media known for their advertising campaigns on social networks (social ads). The user sees the advertisement as if it had been issued by the media, a guarantee which alone strengthens the performance of the campaign according to the defenders of this model. For an identical campaign, the performance gain observed can reach up to +150% according to Mediads.
“The advertiser does not have to modify anything in his infrastructure: he authorizes Mediads directly from his existing advertising space (Business Manager at Meta, Ads Manager at TikTok) without transfer of budget or account,” explains Stéphane Labrouche. It is then Mediads which orchestrates the distribution of the campaigns from the media profiles of its publishing partners. “The advertiser keeps control of his pixels, his audiences, his visuals, his budget. Only the profile which broadcasts the advertising changes. And it is precisely this change which optimizes the ROI of advertisers’ social ads: the authority of the media brand does the work of optimizing attention and conversions with the advertiser’s customer personas.”
Created in 2022, Mediads is also present in Germany, Spain and the United Kingdom, but France remains its main market.
