Celtra Inc., provider of a Software-as-a-Service mobile marketing platform for agencies and brands, secured Series A financing from RSG Capital, a Slovenia-based venture capital fund.

Celtra's suite of mobile marketing services includes SMS, MMS, voice IVR, WAP and mobile applications. Several leading entertainment brands, including 20th Century Fox, New Line Cinema, Warner Bros. and Paramount, have used Celtra's service for movie release campaigns such as Sex and the City, Meet the Spartans, What Happens in Vegas, Tropic Thunder, Notorious, Taken and Terminator Salvation.

"We will use this funding to further develop our SaaS mobile marketing campaign management and distribution platform and to finance our sales and business development efforts in the U.S. market," said Mihael Mikek, CEO of Celtra Inc., Cambridge, MA.

"Our ambition is to develop a highly valuable service for digital and media buy agencies to simplify the creative process in mobile marketing, campaign development, deployment and distribution of integrated and multi-channel mobile initiatives," he said.

"By taking on this challenge from a marketing perspective we will create value in the ecosystem for advertisers, publishers, ad-networks and mobile service providers."

The Celtra service offers customization from marketing perspective and creative freedom to developers.

It provides a single-access-point platform to creative agencies enabling campaign creation, deployment, management, distribution and tracking.

By using Celtra's service, an agency or a brand eliminates costs required for custom application development, service infrastructure and hosting, short-code provisioning, campaign integration with online media and distribution networks, while substantially cutting time required for campaign execution, according to the vendor.

Celtra has launched several mobile promotions for major studios using their online properties, including movie promotion Web sites, official movie promotion profiles on MySpace and Facebook, online ad-units and online widgets.

These campaigns have generated from 50,000 to 160,000 mobile engagements (user actions) per campaign and have improved the performance of online media in terms of interaction rate, stickiness and viral spread, according to Celtra.

"We first introduced our service in January 2008 and have since then worked with several of the major studios," Mr. Mikek said.

Celtra's first project came from L.A.-based digital agency Jetset Studios.

"They helped us take this business off the ground by introducing us to 20th Century Fox, Warner Bros., Paramount and others," Mr. Mikek said. "We have tremendous gratitude for Jetset Studios."

Jetset used Celtra's platform service to develop and launch a viral mobile campaign "Carmen's Crush" to promote the release of the Meet the Spartans movie.

Celtra has also worked with TequilaTBWA, Britain-based agency JAM, which specializes in movie promotions, and media planning agency Vizeum.

"This year we will be reaching out to agencies who are serving consumer brands and other industry verticals," Mr. Mikek said. "Our service makes it really simple for advertisers to integrate mobile into their existing or newly created digital marketing initiatives."

By using Celtra's platform, agencies can create, manage and distribute rich-media online widgets or ad-units that have built-in mobile features, thus enabling consumers to download mobile content or mobile apps, initiate click-to-call, send a branded SMS or an MMS to friends, download mobile coupons and leave voice comments by using their phone.

An extension from online to mobile helps marketers improve performance of online media, while additionally creating valuable mobile engagements, according to Celtra.

Celtra also provides rich-media mobile widgets for in-app advertising on iPhone and Android platforms.

"We have developed fully customizable ready-to-use mobile marketing widgets that get inserted into existing iPhone and/or Android applications," Mr. Mikek said.

"We are planning to introduce a variety of solutions targeted specifically to the entertainment, automotive, QSR and fashion industries," he said.

Celtra also specializes in post-click features and engagement services for mobile advertising, specifically related to mobile ad units.

"The advantage of Celtra's platform to an agency is that the agency can deploy, manage, distribute and analyze a mobile campaign across all available promotional channels," Mr. Mikek said.

"Celtra provides integrated marketing solutions enabling agencies to connect online advertising, mobile marketing and mobile/in-app advertising," he said.