‘Ones to Watch’ is NDA’s new series where we provide young companies in the digital media industry the chance to pitch their business.
Here we meet Lee Henshaw, Founder of Into-it, a music focused ad platform that launched recently…
Who are the key figures in your company and what are their backgrounds?
I’ve spent the best part of thirty years helping entertainment companies connect with fans online. I founded two marketing agencies — Way to Blue and Silence Media — that pioneered new promotional channels, online publicity and online advertising. Before that I was a journalist writing about music and technology.
Into-it’s founding team includes my wife, Claire, who has a background in production and finance and leads our fundraising (we’re raising our Seed Round if you’d like to see the deck).
Our advisory board includes Danny Brooke-Taylor and Andy Nairn at Lucky Generals, Joyce Searls at The Searls Group, Dino Myers-Lamptey at The Barber Shop and Saher Sidhom at Hackmasters.
Together, we’re focused on building technology that improves the experience for advertisers, publishers and fans by aligning with the ideas explored in The Intention Economy by Doc Searls.
In the intention economy, we, the customers, get to reveal the things we intend to buy so that companies can compete to sell those things to us.
So when fans tell us what they’re into, we respond with notifications that are expected and welcome.
Tell us about your product and its key selling points.
Into-it is a Chrome browser extension that improves news websites for music fans by replacing banner ads with personalised notifications, keeping fans up-to-date on their favourite artists’ latest singles, albums, merchandise and tours so that they don’t, as we like to say, miss a beat.
Our extension is designed to improve relationships between music companies, online publishers and fans.
Music companies are ready to shift how they spend their £400m annual budget on advertising albums and concerts by asking fans what they’re into rather than guessing. Our technology delivers bottom-of-the-funnel marketing messages directly to engaged fans, improving effectiveness and efficiency, the holy grail of marketing.
Online publishers can reclaim music industry ad spend by offering a promotional solution that works better for music companies and fans than social media platforms. With Into-it, publishers get a higher Cost Per Thousand (CPM) than the CPM they get for selling banner ads.
Instead of missing out, fans get notifications about new releases, merchandise and tours from artists they’re into. Everybody wins when the focus shifts from the attention economy to the intention economy.
How is it used by advertisers and what sort of results are they seeing?
Into-it offers music companies a new way to reach fans, not through tracking or guesswork, but through declared interest. Fans tell us which artists they love and music companies share personalised notifications with them on premium publisher environments like The Guardian and The Independent. These notifications appear in standard display slots but benefit from what behavioural scientists describe as the endowment effect. We don’t push our notifications on fans – fans pull our notifications in, giving them a sense of ownership.
What’s attracting music companies is the ability to communicate with real fans in these trusted environments, using a natural and respectful format.
It’s still a programmatic buy, so it fits neatly into existing workflows, but the creative opportunity is different. In a recent article about our launch, Sam Anderson at The Drum described Into-it as “a version of direct mail remade for the digital environment.”
It’s early days (we’ve only been live a week), but we’ve seen strong interest from record labels, concert promoters and retailers who want to improve fan engagement and reach musically discerning audiences in new ways. Combining opt-in data, premium media environments, and a better user experience is compelling.
What stage are you at in the UK and other markets? What are the growth plans?
We’re live in the UK and already running campaigns with music companies through publisher partnerships with The Guardian and The Independent. Fans are actively using the product, advertisers are serving notifications, and publishers are monetising new inventory — all without needing to change their existing ad tech setup.
We’ve started in music because it’s a natural fit – fans want to keep up with artists they care about, and marketers want more meaningful ways to reach them. The principle of declared intent has wider application, of course. Our next steps include expanding into other entertainment sectors like books, video games, TV and film, where fandom plays a similar role.
We’re also planning international growth, starting with the US. The infrastructure is in place — we’ve built a system that integrates seamlessly into the programmatic ecosystem and enhances the value of each impression.
Our goal is to improve the experience for all three of our stakeholders: advertisers who want better outcomes, publishers who want to strengthen monetisation, and fans who want a more relevant, respectful internet.
