The ‘Investment’ Category
Tolman Geffs is co-President of Jordan Edmiston Group, which offers independent investment banking services to companies within the media and information industries.
AdExchanger.com: Do you think the ad tech ecosystem is too crowded?
TG: Is it crowded? Absolutely. Will every company that gets funded give a decent return to its VCs? No way. In fact, I think you could take segments of it, and if it was possible to collectively short the segment, you probably would.
There is a real race for scale going on now where you've got a few large players in each major segment, a lot of middle tier players, and many more early entrants. Some of those early entrants will have amazing innovations that will propel them to the top; most won't. Consolidation is now happening at a really fast pace, because it's a race for scale.
Last year we handled Hearst's acquisition of iCrossing, one of the largest interactive ad deals of last year. What Hearst ultimately was buying there was scale. iCrossing had to do a lot of things right for its clients in order to get to that scale, but ultimately it was because they were the scale leader in the space that they were attractive for a large, extremely well run group like Hearst to acquire.
To put it another way, iCrossing could have been doing all the things that they were doing right, but if they were half their size, this wouldn't have been nearly as attractive an acqusiton.
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Sanjay Chadda is Partner & Managing Director at Petsky Prunier, which advised FetchBack on its sale to GSI Commerce Inc. Read the release.
AdExchanger.com: Some think that Fetchback sold before the market collapsed for their services due to factors such as Google opening up self-serve retargeting. How do you respond?
SC: Fetchback was approached by numerous parties late last year and early this year. The Company had no intention of selling but after turning down several offers and certain parties became more aggressive the board decided to hire us to run a limited process. Without going into specifics, the Company was exceeding its monthly budgets. Fetchback was very comfortable to stay a standalone entity but ultimately found a partner that could only accelerate its growth. This deal was not about the broader market or factors within it. This is a combination that ultimately was about winning and taking share.
Is the market for companies offering retargeting services drying up?
Given Fetchback's rapid growth as well as others we don't see the market drying up. Ultimately retargeting is a very effective way to enhance display advertising and its ROI and will help it gain share from other online channels. Display is a big opportunity and tools that enhance it will only gain further prominence in the market.
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Trevor Wright is CEO of DogTime Media.
AdExchanger.com: Does Adify still provide the technology "backbone" of Dogtime? How has that relationship evolved?
DogTime leveraged Adify's technology backbone to launch our vertical community, but quickly evolved beyond their capabilities and have been independent of Adify for more than a year.
Are advertisers buying from DogTime Media to target the "dog lovers" vertical, if you will, or are advertisers targeting audience with other, less endemic objectives, too?
DogTime has been successful in attracting not just endemic advertisers that want to reach passionate pet enthusiasts, but also with non-endemic advertisers who are targeting highly engaged women between the ages of 25-54, such as 20th Century Fox, Paramount, Toyota, Chronicle Books, Bissell, Eureka, Harper Collins, Dyson, etc.
Describe the revenue share. Does it vary according to publisher and advertiser format (widget vs. standard display)?
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Nay-sayers: ready to admit that online display advertising is not dead - it's just getting started?
In its latest Q1 earnings report, Valueclick sheds light on the growing opportunity in display as display ad revenues increased from the prior year according to PaidContent after VLCK's earnings conference call:
"Display beat expectations, gaining 2 percent to $34 million. While not earth-shattering, it's another sign that display might have hit bottom and may rise slowly. During the call, (Valueclick CEO) Vadnais noted that lead gen marketing, which makes up the other half of its media segment was down 20 percent, as spending migrated to display."
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Yesterday, online ad exchange contender and Redwood City, California-based, Turn Inc., announced a new round of investment totaling $15 million.
Led by Focus Ventures and joined by Norwest Venture Partners (NVP), Trident Capital, and Shasta Venture, Turn has now received more than $37 million in equity investment since its inception - yet another signal that investors see the ad exchange space as growing importance in the years to come. Turn plans to use the latest round for building out its platform and expanding its sales teams as they continue to push ahead with clients - presumably the "national branded response advertisers" that have used or considered the exchange.
Turn tries to ride the fence with the phrase: "national branded response advertisers" - very direct response-focused in spite of the insertion of the word "brand." ...It's all DR online, perhaps? That's where the CEO seems to be guiding us. Competitors such as Google/DoubleClick, Yahoo!'s Right Media and ContextWeb's ADSDAQ would likely agree.
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ContextWeb, makers of the contextual online ad exchange, ADSDAQ, announced today a Series D round of financing.
Their fourth round was led by an investment from Investor Growth Capital and additional funding came from all current investors: DFJ (Draper, Fisher and Jurvetson), DFJ Gotham Ventures, Updata Partners, DFJ New England, plus Gold Hill Capital.
With acquisitions of Right Media by Yahoo!, DoubleClick by Google and AdECN by Microsoft the burgeoning ad exchange space continues to attract buckets of money for those with their toes in the exchange waters.
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Feeling it couldn't be left out of the advertising exchange party, Microsoft, acquired tiny AdECN for what some suggest is in the $50-75 million range.
In the wake of previous advertising exchange platform purchases such as Google's $3.1 billion acquisition of DoubleClick which included its exchange and Yahoo!'s $700 million purchase of RightMedia and RMX, Microsoft evidently felt that it needed to have its own ad exchange tools and AD ECN fit the bill.
In the Microsoft press release, they state, "AdECN brings both key technologies and significant domain expertise to the Microsoft team."
According to Marketwatch, Microsoft's Kevin Johnson has said that AD ECN will become part of Microsoft's growing Ad Center platform.
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It's happy times on the Right Media Exchange as employees and shareholders took in another $680 million from Yahoo! to be fully-acquired by the struggling web search/entertainment/whatever monolith.
With Google's purchase of DoubleClick and its developing AdX Exchange, Yahoo! felt it needed to answer and it did. Will Microsoft now step up to the plate?
RightMedia currently provides the exchange platform to large advertisers and publishers and lets them battle it out in an exchange format which provides efficiency as opposed to the blackbox of AdSense or the more traditional, negotiate way of doing business that is familiar to ad networks.
In the Yahoo! press release regarding Yahoo's initial investment last October, Greg Coleman, EVP of Global Media Sales, says, "Yahoo! believes an open and transparent ad exchange is an innovative new distribution channel for non-premium inventory and encourages competition in the market."
To date, it is believed the largest client on RMX has been Yahoo! which has tons of inventory that is hard to monetize such as its gargantuan email inventory. If the Right Media ad exchange can even make a penny or two more per CPM than Yahoo can do by itself, that could be a significant opportunity for Yahoo!.
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Google has bought DoubleClick for a breathtaking $3.1 billion in a transaction that is expected to find regulatory approval after a hard slog.
With DoubleClick's huge display ad serving business, it made sense for mighty Google to swing for the fences in that Google's display business is almost non-existent. The DART ad serving system will be a jewel for Google that is to be envied by other players such as Yahoo! and Microsoft.
In addition, DoubleClick's new advertising exchange business will likely provide a platform upon which Google can leverage its existing AdSense/AdWords network and move toward the next generation of online advertising. It is believed that the acquisition price bloomed as the advertising exchange became seen as a "must-have" at Google.
Some agree with Google's blog post about the acquisition that DoubleClick gives Google important agency relationships. This appears true - though Google's still going to have a lot of hands to hold once this transaction is complete.
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