Visage Transforms Brand Marketers into Powerhouse Data Storytellers
Founders of Column Five Secure $2.15 Million; Open Powerful, Simple, DIY, Web Platform That Lets Users Publish On-Brand Data Graphics in Just Three Minutes
IRVINE, Calif., June 18, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- Visage today announces availability of its Web platform, immediately empowering content marketers to easily create branded data graphics. Visage is well-positioned for rapid scale, with $2.15 million in Seed funding secured, led by Southern California-based Venture51, with additional investment from K5 Ventures, Robin Pimentel, Dan Martell and Kima Ventures. In just three minutes, marketers can now express their brand's identity by transforming information and numbers into a powerful story, saving on the high cost and long production times of professional design.
"Every company is now a data company, because of the huge amount of information captured through Web and other analytics," said Jason Lankow, CEO and co-founder. "Each brand and business sits on rich insights from original market research, customer behavior and other compelling data, and turning those numbers into stories has fundamentally changed how we communicate -- but has been relegated to analysts, data visualization practitioners and designers until now."
The Visage founders know the power of data storytelling better than most, having founded and grown Column Five, Inc. which has created custom content for leading brands like Microsoft, LinkedIn, Red Bull and Nike. Now, by offering a simple, do-it-yourself approach to data-focused content creation, Visage gives customers like VMware, Intuit and CareerBuilder a way to quickly create fresh content that not only follows an organization's unique visual language, but also strengthens an audience's trust in and understanding of the brand.
"Brand marketers are always challenged to create more engaging, original content," continued Lankow. "The original insights in their internal data are an untapped goldmine for telling fresh stories in content marketing, but there's a gap between the analyst and marketer that needs to be bridged first. We start by making every marketing team immediately data literate, enhancing their storytelling power."
Visage's user interface offers enough design flexibility to truly customize content, while not overwhelming users with clutter. With various data graphic templates for simple design, and text graphic templates for inserting quotes and other non-data content, users can focus more time on polishing the editorial aspect of each story.
"This is the team that pioneered the use of data visualization in content marketing several years ago," said Brandon Zeuner, co-founder and managing partner of Venture51. "Communicating with data is a mandatory marketing skill and this group has built a product that shows that they understand the data design needs of brands."
Key partnerships with Hubspot, Kapost and Brandfolder let customers use branded graphics for publishing. Visage also offers a smart integration for Slack, which allows users of the popular communication platform to instantly share Visage graphics with team members.
Additionally, Visage offers:
- Complete customization – Users can tailor each template to best reflect a brand's identity
- Brand asset memory – Branding remains the default at login, helping marketers stay consistent with each new project
- Educational workshops – Visage's data visualization experts offer on-site or Web-based walkthroughs of data visualization fundamentals
- Experts on hand – Visage offers a managed service called 'Newsroom Creative' to run micro-content campaigns for companies that don't have the time or resources to produce data stories in-house
- Real-time customer support – Live support helps users get the look, feel and story right
About Visage
Visage is a content creation platform that empowers marketers to create branded visual content optimized for the distribution channels that are most important to their business. Founded in 2012 by Column Five co-founders, Jason Lankow, Ross Crooks and Josh Ritchie, and Jake Burkett and Sean Parent, who led product development as part of Column Five Labs. Together, the founding team has done thousands of data graphics for over 500 nationally known brands. Visage is based in Irvine, CA and Brooklyn, NY. For more information about Visage, please visit www.visage.co.
Chelsea Giudice
415-963-9839
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