DoubleVerify purchased Ad-Juster for an undisclosed amount Thursday in an all-cash, all-stock offer. The analytics platform gives publishers a stitched-together view of their programmatic ad performance.
“A lot of our work today is with advertisers to maximize their quality and performance,” said DoubleVerify CEO Wayne Gattinella. “Ad-Juster extends our platform to the supply side.”
Ad-Juster was previously acquired in January 2017 by Innotech, a Chinese private equity firm, during a time when Chinese investment in US-based companies was hot. That market has since cooled, allowing DoubleVerify to pick up Ad-Juster.
By the first half of 2020, DoubleVerify will enrich the Ad-Juster platform with insights about how buyers see a publisher’s inventory. With the automation of programmatic, it’s become harder for publishers to understand what buyers are targeting or what kind of inventory they want – a problem that DoubleVerify wants to solve for publishers.
For example, publishers can see how buyers are classifying their content using brand safety keywords, and figure out if that aligns with how they view their content. They can also see in real time the viewability of inventory before the ad call and delivery.
The ultimate integration goal? “Using market-based signals on the demand side to feed the supply-side delivery,” Gattinella said.
DoubleVerify has been looking for a supply side, publisher-based analytics tool since the beginning of the year. “Ad-Juster was the strongest technology we saw, with a premiere customer base and strong customer satisfaction,” Gattinella said. “Customer retention has been excellent, and customer feedback has been stellar.”
The acquisition adds 110 publishers on SaaS contracts to DoubleVerify’s roster, including half of the Comscore 100 publishers. All 40 employees at Ad-Juster will stay on post-acquisition.
Ad-Juster marks DoubleVerify’s third acquisition in the past 12 months. In January, it bought Finnish content classification company Leiki, a competitor to Grapeshot. In March, it bought Brussels-based video measurement company Zentrick.
Behind all three acquisitions is a common theme of “taking more control of the tech stack,” Gattinella said.
Rather than use companies as an outside vendor, DoubleVerify wants to acquire them and bring those competencies in house – and expand into new areas via Ad-Juster’s sell-side analytics tool.
