A Santa Barbara firm has just garnered a $6 million investment to see if it can shake up the broadcast, radio and print advertising world the same way its leaders shook up the online advertising world.

Impact Radius has rolled out a new online platform for advertisers and media firms to buy and sell performance-based advertising, a trend that’s quickly swept the online advertising world but remains largely unexplored in other media. The founding team — Wade Crang, Todd Crawford, Lisa Riolo, Roger Kjensrud and Per Pettersen — were all executives at Commission Junction, a Santa Barbara-based unit of Westlake Village-based online marketing giant ValueClick.

First, some definitions. With performance-based advertising, the advertiser pays the publisher of the ad only when the advertiser gets some sort of measurable result — say, a new customer or a sale to an existing customer. It differs from older models where the advertiser never quite knows exactly how many new customers or sales its ad dollars are bringing in.

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