Tracking a competitor’s online advertising – both creative and media placements – remains an important niche served by both specialist vendors and global research companies. With mobile ad spend rising, the pressure is now on these players to build out ad intelligence tools for the mobile channel.
To that end one well-regarded startup, WhatRunsWhere, has acquired early stage mobile counterpart Mobile Ad Spy for an undisclosed sum. Mobile Ad Spy focuses on providing performance data for existing mobile campaigns, which saves its customers the cost and headache of testing copy and other creative elements.
In a June blog post it noted, “We are currently tracking and holding data on just over 5,000 advertisers running 100,000 ads that hit 1,000,000 landing pages in 7 countries on over 3,000 placements. Some of our data in the UK is over a year old, but most is just over 6 months.”
Both companies are young. Mobile Ad Spy first opened up to beta customers in May. WhatRunsWhere launched a year ago and competes with AdClarity, AdBeat, and MixRank. Bigger players in the space are Kantar Media’s AdExpress and comScore AdMetrix (which also has a mobile capability).
With the acquisition WhatRunsWhere grows from 8 employees to 10. WhatRunsWhere has customers including performance marketers like MediaTrust and Dedicated Media. It doesn’t disclose customer numbers but Mobile Ad Spy says it has 50 beta testers of its product.
WhatRunsWhere COO Max Teitelbaum tells AdExchanger, “The deal closed in June, but we’ve been working since then to build everything together and clean everything up. We’re completely self-funded. [Cofounder] Mike Cojanu and I both ran successful marketing companies before this, so we took all the risk as we built it. We have no plans to raise money for now, but who knows what the future holds.”
