What Bizo will do with its $6M second round

Bizo CEO Russell Glass doesn’t want you to see his clients’ ads. Unless you’re a top-level exec whose browser cookie says you have lots of money and like to spend it.
“We are putting 100% of the impressions in front of execs,” Glass told me on the phone while discussing the company’s second round of funding. VentureBeat reported the funding via SEC filings last week, but only now is Glass talking about the whole story of what Biz0 (pronounced biz-oh, as in business) plans to do next.
The San Francisco-based company, founded in May of 2008, brokers ads targeted only to qualified browsers that have been cookied with demographic info that appeals to advertisers like American Express and Hoover’s. Bizo sets the cookies by buying user data and member info from companies that share it. “We basically create like an anonmyous business card that the user carries around on the web,” Glass explained. They may not be aware of it, but they’ll be getting ads for luxury cars instead of family vans.
You can see Bizo’s demographic settings for the cookie in your browser by clicking here. Glass claims Bizo now reaches 45 million targeted business people across thousands of sites. As a result, he sounds less worried about other B2B boutiques and more about Google’s DoubleClick ad network somehow cracking the executive-ad market. LinkedIn is a more direct competitor, since they can target ads incredibly tightly to their members’ careers, position, location, and other personal factors typed in by the member.
Right now, most of the money aimed at influencing traditional fatcats is spent offline, not on Internet ads. Bizo’s main strategy isn’t to steal ad buys from other small players, but to persuade advertisers to ditch magazine spreads and TV ads for Internet ads that they can guarantee will only be seen by ideal audience members. Many companies, such as RingRevenue, tout this same mission. Why fight over scraps when you can reel in the big fish onto the Net?
“It’s still a manual process,” Glass said of the high end of the ad market, unlike the self-serve everyman world of Google’s AdWords and AdSense. “Most large advertisers have their own ad servers. They send an insertion order [a form that specifies the advertisement, its target and when it is to start and finish running. For some reason this isn't covered in Wikipedia] and ad tags, the JavaScript that calls their ad. We run the ads and give them detailed analytics.”
Hundred-year-old firm Bessemer Venture Partners led the second round, but prior investors Venrock, Vulcan and Ascent all joined in again, too. The purpose of the funding is to continue building out the network and refining the analytic tools, the two most tempting lures fr trolling high-end advertisers who haven’t been ho0ked yet by onlin advertising. Glass sounds like many other advertising people when he says, “The thing we’re fighting is that most advertising dollars are still spent offline.”