Any advertising trade reporter will tell you that their inbox is clogged by a ceaseless daily parade of press releases and pitches trumpeting ad tech company partnerships.
But the partnership announced on Thursday between MediaMath’s new owner, Infillion, and AdLib, a programmatic media buying platform for small and midsize ad buyers, isn’t a typical integration.
It’s what you might call a reintegration.
AdLib was previously integrated with MediaMath for more than six years – right up until the morning of June 30. That was the day MediaMath, without warning to its employees, clients or partners, suddenly declared bankruptcy and shut down its platform, leaving companies like AdLib in the lurch.
New math
The bankruptcy news was a major blow to AdLib, which, at the time, had 100% of its spend running through MediaMath’s DSP.
That July 4 weekend was a mad scramble to migrate live campaigns to other buying platforms as quickly as possible. Mike Hauptman, AdLib’s CEO and co-founder, even had to call in favors from friends to piggyback onto their DSP seats.
Once the triage was complete, however, Hauptman and his co-founder, Dan Bougourd, realized that survival meant diversification.
They quickly began striking new DSP partnerships and now have direct integrations with Xandr, Adform, Criteo, Google’s DV360, Beeswax, Moloco and Kayzen, along with several others still in the works.
“The bankruptcy news was painful, and it was challenging,” Hauptman told AdExchanger. “It was also a forcing function for us.”
MediaMath memories
But beyond the upheaval to its business, MediaMath’s demise was personal for Hauptman and Bougourd, both former long-term MediaMath executives.
They first incubated the AdLib technology for two years within MediaMath, with support from the leadership team, before spinning out the company as a standalone entity in 2018.
The original idea behind AdLib was to build a self-serve user interface on top of MediaMath to make it easier for midsize marketers and agencies to buy without contracts or minimums.
Most enterprise DSPs have complex UIs and require at least $1 million in annual spend, including hitting a monthly minimum threshold.
“We were kind of like an easier-to-use version of MediaMath and without needing a lot of paperwork,” Hauptman said.
Today, AdLib does pretty much the same thing, but as an entry point for buyers to run and optimize campaigns across multiple DSPs – a list that once again includes MediaMath (which has been rebranded as MediaMath by Infillion).
MediaMath, take two
By now, the drama swirling around MediaMath’s downfall has died down, said Rob Emrich, Infillion’s founder and executive chairman.
Infillion closed its $22 million acquisition of MediaMath in mid-September, having purchased the company out of bankruptcy. The assets are now fully integrated into the Infillion tech stack, which also includes CTV ad platform TrueX and location data company Gimbal.
The next phase, Emrich told AdExchanger, is to focus on scaling the platform by reactivating as many of MediaMath’s preexisting relationships and strategic partnerships as possible, including with past customers and with companies that built businesses on top of MediaMath – like AdLib.
Most of MediaMath’s former supply, data and infrastructure partners have been excited to reestablish relations, Emrich said. They’re not ones to hold a grudge or be skittish when a revenue opportunity presents itself, he said.
But brand customers have been another story. Many were burned when MediaMath hastily shut its doors, so they’re a little harder to woo, Emrich acknowledged.
Still, several of MediaMath’s former customers are back on board, and Infillion is also signing up new ones, he said, many of which will start spending over the next few months and in the coming quarters.
Programmatic partners
Some of these new clients will come to Infillion through the AdLib tie-up.
Part of what makes reintegrating AdLib with MediaMath appealing is that it opens up a new client base of smaller and midmarket customers for Infillion, which has mainly served larger enterprise businesses.
The offerings are also complementary, Emrich said.
“Different types of buyers have different needs – like a smaller enterprise is often very focused on conversions and driving particular KPIs,” he said. “We can help with that, because we bring closed-loop location data with targeting and measurement in a way that wasn’t available to AdLib before.”
For example, MediaMath has a solution for measuring footfall that most other DSPs don’t offer, according to Hauptman. When MediaMath went kaput, so did AdLib’s ability to measure foot traffic. Plugging back into MediaMath revives that capability and supplements it with location data from Gimbal.
AdLib’s customers will also be exposed to more streaming inventory through TrueX and regain access to MediaMath’s data management capabilities.
Creating and activating first-party data segments without a direct data management platform integration “is actually really difficult to do on the fly through other platforms,” Hauptman said.
“A unified DMP and DSP is not something that really exists in the DSP world at this point,” he said, “but MediaMath has that.”
Supply chain reaction
Unification of the tech stack is a key component of Infillion’s broader vision.
Although it has all of the “big pieces” it needs for the moment, Emrich said, the possibility of more M&A is always on the table – and Emrich has never been shy about striking deals.
In addition to Gimbal, TrueX and MediaMath (acquired in 2016, 2020 and 2023, respectively), Infillion’s portfolio includes Drawbridge’s US media arm, location data company Fysical, UberMedia’s managed media business, OOH platform InStadium, in-store visitation software Analytiks AI and market research company Phonic.
These companies and books of business were all acquired over the past six years. The more comprehensive the offering Infillion can assemble for buyers and sellers, the better, Emrich said.
“We see value for customers in helping consolidate the whole supply chain,” he said. “That’s been our thesis and our strategy going back to the early days.”
