Shortly after spending $485 million on DG (now Sizmek’s) TV ads business, Extreme Reach has bought video ad intelligence company BrandAds.
Although he declined to name the deal price, John Roland, CEO of Extreme Reach said all 12 BrandAds employees will continue on with the acquiring company.
“What the DG [acquisition did was] give us very large market share on the TV side,” he said. “We had our own digital ad serving product, but BrandAds brings fraud detection, brand safety, audience measurement and social monitoring, basically expanding our digital offering into areas we weren’t in before.”
BrandAds rolled out BrandAds Bridge 2.0 in April, an updated version of its ad server that includes measurement at the domain and placement level. What this basically does is allow brand marketers to track metrics around traffic quality, video player size and viewable impressions.
“When you’re merging TV with digital, you’re supposed to be getting the scale and audience of TV with the accountability and measurement of digital,” Roland said. “The problem with digital right now is [studies show] up to half of impressions are not pre-roll impressions. They’re actually running in-banner, below the fold or auto-start.” BrandAds Bridge is designed to help solve this.
The next step for the company is integrating BrandAds capabilities into the Cross-Media Reporting Suite, a platform Extreme Reach launched last March. The gist of the suite is to provide a standard means of measurement for campaigns cross-screen; it combines both digital ad serving information and TV campaign analysis, the company claims.
That way, if Coca-Cola is airing a commercial during prime time, for example, “we’re able to detect the occurrences of when commercials are airing,” Roland claimed. “We can detect that [a certain audience at prime time is] 600,000 people so we’ll know how many impressions it got on the TV side… and then determine how the media spend is being spread across screens on the digital side.”
Extreme Reach last June accepted a $50 million minority investment growth round from Spectrum Equity, which has spurred much of its recent acquisition activity. Of the roughly $250 million in revenue it generates a year, 30% of its business is direct from brands while 70% is agency-derived. The company serves 9,000 advertisers and agencies, Roland said.
