Matomy Media Group To Buy MobFox; Marissa Mayer's Hiring Desires

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign-up here.

Buying Programmatic

Tel Aviv-based performance marketing player Matomy Media Group snapped up mobile programmatic ad platform MobFox for $17.6 million. “The impressive growth of programmatic and mobile advertising has made it clear that both will form an important part of the future of digital advertising,” said Matomy CEO Ofer Druker. Read the press release. The deal follows a stock sale giving Publicis Groupe 20% of Matomy. Pair with Publicis’ acquisition of ad platform RUN (AdExchanger story). Publicis, ad tech owner!

Mayer Seeking Reinforcements

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer wants to hire Amazon’s head of global advertising sales Lisa Utzschneider, according to Re/code’s sources. Though it’s unclear which role Mayer’s looking to fill, sources familiar with the situation say she could be looking for someone to lead Yahoo’s Americas division or take on a potential C-suite position. The rumor comes in the wake of better-than-expected Q3 earnings for Yahoo. More.

BuzzFeed’s Data Acqui-Hire

BuzzFeed is becoming more data savvy with the purchase of Torando. The data engineering company was co-founded by Todd Levy, who has worked as a software engineer at AOL and subsequently co-founded Bitly. Levy will move into his new role at BuzzFeed as VP of data engineering to lead the 10-strong data science team. BuzzFeed CTO Mark Wilkie was succinct: “We wanted to double down on big data.” Terms were not disclosed. TechCrunch has more.

First To The Party

First-party data is the cat’s pajamas, Ad Age reports. And dumb pipes are going away. “Scale without data is becoming less valuable every day,” commented Wells Fargo Securities senior analyst Peter Stabler. Facebook built Atlas using first-party data, and marketers like Kraft, Netflix and Kellogg are all about it. But Xaxis CEO Brian Lesser says it’s “getting harder, not easier” to manage that CRM data set. “It’s not just having that data, it’s also having some machine intelligence able to tease apart that data.”

Apple Payment Data

Apple Pay is rapidly becoming a big deal. One million credit cards were activated within 72 hours of the mobile wallet launch last week, CEO Tim Cook said at the WSJD Live Global Technology Conference. More than 220,000 retailers are participating, but NOT Rite Aid, CVS, Wal-Mart or Best Buy. Cook hammered on his privacy message, suggesting transaction data is locked away and unavailable to outside parties, whether those parties are the government or the marketing industry. “We’re not Big Brother,” he added, “We’ll leave that to others.” MarketWatch has more.