The Netherlands-based telco Altice will acquire Teads in a cash deal that values the outstream video ad tech firm at $307 million, the companies confirmed Tuesday morning.
It’s the latest in a string of acquisitions for Altice. Earlier this month, the company bought the US programmatic platform Audience Partners for an undisclosed sum, and last year it closed on its $17.7 billion deal for Cablevision, a New York City-market cable company with addressable ad solutions.
“Convergence of telecoms, content, and advertising is at the core of our business,” Michel Combes, CEO of Altice, said in a statement. “There is significant incremental value to be generated from our assets. Teads, a powerful business in itself, with major presence in Altice footprint notably in the U.S. and France, will enable us to offer a truly unique value proposition to brands and agencies on the one hand and the media industry, programmers and distributors on the other.”
France-based Teads’ 2016 gross revenue was $173.8 million, a 44% increase over the previous year, according to an Altice news release. Business Insider was first to report the deal.
Some advertisers have pushed back on outstream advertising as disruptive to user experience, since the videos play on the page instead of in a pre-roll or mid-roll spot or in a native feed. But publishers have embraced the idea since it generates incremental video revenue without the accompanying costs of video content production.
Teads’ publisher relationships form a powerful ad network for Altice to potentially push its own first-party data. The company says it works with “500+ premium publishers globally and 8,000 vertically specialized publishers.”
Seventy-six percent of its impressions were transacted through private marketplaces, up from about 30% in 2015.
Altice said it plans to boost Teads revenue by leveraging its own ROI analysis and subscriber data. “The combination is expected to provide immediate commercial and financial benefits to Altice’s advertising business, in particular as it relates making unique first-party data available to Teads in the US and France,” according to the release.
Under the deal terms, 75% of the deal price will be paid out on closing, expected by mid-2017, with the other 25% linked to 2017 performance and payable in 2018. Key Teads management, including Executive Chairman Pierre Chappaz and Chief Executive Officer Bertrand Quesada, will stay on board and Chappaz will join Altice’s board relating to its advertising business.
Update [1:40pm]
Traditional mobile and internet service providers now require additional media content and ad service businesses as support, Altice CEO Michel Combes said in a press conference Tuesday afternoon. “And data is the heart and common denominator of those three pillars.”
Historically Altice would use data to improve its own customer service or target subscribers with expiring contracts.
But Combes knows that telco data is also useful for other brands’ marketers. And distributing ads across a network of other video inventory sources is “something we’ve been working on and in the foreseeable future will be trying to kick things up a notch,” he said.
The media Teads can access is one of the only scaled data-driven video inventory pools outside of Google, Facebook and cable companies, said Pierre Chappaz, Teads co-founder and executive chairman, at the press conference. “Teads and Altice really clicked because we shared the goal of providing a media and analysis solution competitive to Google.”
Bertrand Quesada, Teads co-founder and CEO, contrasted Teads’ ads playing across editorial outlets with the “nonprofessional video content” typical for YouTube or Facebook.
