Cannes is where deals get done – and sometimes don’t get done. MediaMath knows this all too well.
In Cannes last year, MediaMath was in the midst of furiously attempting to get itself acquired, a final lifeline before having to go out of business. Those negotiations ended up falling apart and MediaMath went bankrupt one week later, its demise making for one of the biggest ad tech stories of the year.
But that’s not where MediaMath’s story ends, says Laurel Rossi, CRO and CMO of ad tech platform Infillion, on this week’s episode of AdExchanger Talks, recorded live in Cannes last week. In August, Infillion bought MediaMath’s assets out of bankruptcy and, earlier this year, relaunched the offering as part of its stack.
And the integration – still ongoing – has been a heavy lift. This process is always a big project from a technology perspective, let alone for a platform that was on ice for several months. But, in this case, there’s also a human element to the integration, Rossi says.
More than 300 people lost their jobs when MediaMath closed its doors, and Infillion has made it a priority to rehire as many former employees as possible. It’s been able to bring back roughly 60 people so far, including many of the engineers, and “that’s ramping every week,” Rossi says.
Infillion is also reactivating preexisting relationships with MediaMath’s supply, data and infrastructure partners.
But what about brands? MediaMath’s advertiser clients were left scrambling to reroute their spend after MediaMath’s sudden shutdown, which happened to happen on the Friday before the July 4 holiday weekend.
They’re coming around, Rossi says. Infillion has 80 customers in the pipeline, three-quarters of which have already been activated.
“That’s been a nice trajectory for us and a nice Year One,” Rossi says. “I don’t know what we expected, but we didn’t expect anything to some degree.”
In terms of what’s next, Infillion plans to offer self-serve options – it’s mostly been in the managed service business until now – and focus more on CTV. To be fair, who isn’t?
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“But we’re not necessarily looking to be the third or fourth DSP,” Rossi says. “We’re looking to be ourselves in terms of our ability to service the middle and upper part of the market in a unique way.”
Also in this episode: A debrief on Cannes trends, the bull – and bear – case for retail media networks, why Infillion decided to combine the CRO and CMO roles into one and how to convince creatives that “programmatic” is not a dirty word. Plus, why Rossi made the move to ad tech in 2021 after more than two decades working at agencies.
For more articles featuring Laurel Rossi, click here.
