• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, January 4, 2012

Anxious to scale its social video advertising platform, Unruly just secured a $25 million Series A investment from Amadeus Capital Partners, Van den Ende & Deitmer and Business Growth Fund. Since its debut in 2006, the London-based company claims to have executed over 1,400 social video campaigns, while delivering, tracking, and auditing 1.34 billion user-intended video views.

“We set out to help brands capture the massive opportunity in social video,” said Unruly founder and Group CEO Scott Button.

Unruly’s proprietary technology, RAMP (Real-time Amplification and Measurement Platform) powers social video campaigns for Old Spice, Electronic Arts, adidas, Unilever, T-Mobile and Coca-Cola.

It also had a hand in spreading Evian’s "Roller Babies," T-Mobile’s “Life’s for Sharing,” Coca Cola’s “Happiness Factory” series, and Old Spice’s “Man Your Man Could Smell Like” campaigns.

Profitable since 2009, Unruly reported full-year revenue of $25 million in 2011, and a current revenue run-rate nearing $50 million.

Industrywide, social video campaigns generated 2.7 billion views in 2010 and more than 8 billion views in 2011, and are predicted to generate 20 billion views in 2012, according to Unruly.

Unruly is hoping to address the confusion that can result from media fragmentation and device proliferation, which has made it difficult to do scale social video campaigns. To date, it claims a global reach of 725 million consumers across 74 countries.

However, in a case of bad timing, Unruly was just linked to a questionable effort by Google to pay bloggers to run posts promoting its Chrome browser. Defending the campaign -- which Unruly executed on Google’s behalf -- Button blamed the issue on a technical mistake by a single blogger.

“As far as I’m aware, there was one link in one post that was not marked nofollow,” Button explained in an email to AllThingsD. “This was corrected as soon as we became aware of it.”

Button also told Online Media Daily: "Unruly never requires bloggers to link back to an advertiser's site. That's because we're in the business of video advertising, not search engine marketing, so link juice is irrelevant to our business model. We don't ask for it, we don't pay for it, and we don't track it.

"In line with FTC and EU regulation, Unruly always requires that bloggers clearly disclose any post, tweet, or other reference to the video as being sponsored. We also request that if they do link anywhere they use nofollow, both because that's best practice, and also because it's in their own interest to do so."