RichRelevance Buys Searchandise For Shopper Marketing; Specific Adds Shopping; IDC On Mobile Display

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

Shopper Marketing M&A

RichRelevance (AdExchanger.com Q&A in Feb. ’11) has acquired Searchandise (AdExchanger.com Q&A in May ’10) in yet another 2011 deal. Ad Age’s Jack Neff reports that “RichRelevance said the combined companies will serve 10 of the 25 biggest retailers on the web, also including Sears. (…) The deal combines companies in two of the fastest-growing segments of media and marketing in recent years: digital and shopper marketing.” No terms were announced for what was likely an all-stock transaction. Read more. Originally known as Decidia way back in 2000 and then Guidester when it raised $3 million in 2006, the company changed its name to Searchandise in 2008 and took two more rounds of funding ($14.5 million total). Getting rolled up into an industry counterpart may have been the best bet at this point for Searchandise.

Shopping Network

Specific Media announced the launch of a new product called Shopper Access which is the results of a partnership with offline data provider Nielsen Catalina Solutions. From the release, Specific claims that “the alliance marks the largest integration of offline purchase behavior and online ad data at this scale. Specific Media offers the largest addressable CPG audience with its Shopper Access solution, and is the only company to provide this type of platform for both video and display ads.” Read more.

Evil Doers

On his personal blog, LeadsCon and Daily Deals Summit empresario Jay Weintraub exposes the havoc caused by a “good” scam. He begins, “It’s examples like this one that, while they make for great stories, they are a blight on the performance marketing space. They are sheer evil genius but also the reason people associate lead gen / affiliate marketing with shady.” Read about the evil.

Ad Spend Momentum Or Not

All Things D’s Peter Kafka discusses whisperings of an ad slowdown and that search still seems to be pumping. Nevertheless Kafka reports on Citi analyst Mark Mahaney’s latest musings which note “that Efficient Frontier, the search marketer Adobe plans on buying, says its Q4 numbers show a ‘slight deceleration’ from the rest of the year. But compared to the sour faces I’ve seen from some ad guys in recent weeks, that’s fine.” Read more.

Squeezing The Stone

In an interview with Bloomberg, Aol CEO Tim Armstrong says that the company’s dial-up Internet access business along with AOL Instant Messenger and other web services will be bundled up and report into Aol’s CFO Arthur Minson. Wall Street analyst Clayton Moran states the obvious, “The finance guy is going to try to squeeze every dollar out of the value of those businesses.” Squeeze more.

DMP Update

In an interview on AdMonsters, GM Andy Lehman at Lotame says the company is looking to add new features to add to its data management platform including “content personalization and cross-channel data management.” Lehman also touches on the possibilities of data licensing for publishers. Read more.

Mobile Display Update

Google is making advances in its mobile display market share. BusinessWeek’s Olga Kharif writes, “Google’s share of the market for 2011 will rise to 24 percent share, from 19 percent in 2010, said IDC, a unit of Boston-based International Data Group. Millennial’s share will climb to 17 percent from 15 percent, as Apple’s declines to 15 percent from 19 percent, IDC said today.” Still, there’s that tasty Apple user demo. Could Apple completely close the gate to its Ipad and Iphone and start its own Web? The deprecation of the UDID a couple of months back could have been the first step. Read more.

But Wait. There’s More!