Qriously raises $3.5M for hyper-accurate 'askvertising'

Polling platform Qriously has just grabbed itself a nice $3.5 million sack o’ change from Spark Capital and Accel Partners for its own special brand of mobile ads.

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Hang on to your hats: It’s called askvertising, or, as Qriously would spell that made-up word, asQvertising.

(Yes, they capitalize the Q. It’s a whole thing.)

Here’s asQvertising in a nutshell: You’re on your phone, and there’s an ad asking you if you garden, yes or no. You choose “yes,” and now an advertiser knows you’re a great target for fertilizer sale ads. The ad man wins because he’s found a highly qualified lead that is much more likely to convert into a sale. You win because hey, at least it’s not another irrelevant banner asking if you’d like to meet sexy singles in your area.

The whole thing looks something like this:

AsQvertising can be used for research or for marketing. For research purposes, users get to see the results of the mini-poll, and researchers get location data on poll results. For marketing, users get sorted into virtual bins: Serve the ad and Don’t serve the ad. And of course, Qriously gives marketers analytics on the poll results.

“Everything we develop focuses on unlocking the intrinsic worth of people’s opinions,” said Qriously CEO Christopher Kahler in a statement on the news.

“We believe there is a great depth of value behind the question network model because you can focus the collective wisdom of the crowd to gain unparalleled insight and enable efficient ad targeting at scale.”

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Today’s announced funding is Qriously’s first institutional round. The startup was founded in 2010 and has headquarters in New York and London with outposts in Atlanta and Vienna.