Infillion is finally unveiling its intentions for MediaMath after buying the company out of bankruptcy during an auction last month.
On Thursday, Infillion announced it has officially closed its acquisition of MediaMath and intends to relaunch the DSP early next year.
Infillion, a video ad tech platform born from the union of location data company Gimbal and CTV ad platform TrueX, considers MediaMath’s DSP as an essential addition to its ad tech stack.
“Having a centralized DSP is a technological backbone for our company” and the “primary reason” for making the acquisition, Rob Emrich, executive chairman and founder of Infillion, told AdExchanger.
Now, Infillion is wiping the dust off of MediaMath’s technology and rebooting it. The process involves hiring back employees, reinstating business agreements with SSP partners and data vendors and opening the platform back up for customers. Then, Infillion can start to integrate its own ad products with MediaMath where it makes sense.
“We’re going in order,” Emrich said.
Emrich spoke with AdExchanger.
AdExchanger: Are MediaMath employees really coming back?
ROB EMRICH: Yes. We’re in all-out recruiting mode trying to bring employees back – and we’ve already hired four people.
But it’s complicated. Some employees feel super excited to come back; others are more tentative.
What about SSP partners and clients? Is there some awkwardness reinstating business partnerships after the recent clawbacks?
Awkwardness is a word I would use for partner vendors in this type of situation. But many of them are generally excited that we’re turning this platform back on because it can start to generate revenue for those vendors again. Plus, MediaMath is a platform these vendors have already been familiar with for over a decade.
It’ll still be a mixed bag, though. Some of these vendors have interim solutions, but haven’t made full migrations elsewhere yet. Others will just move on.
And what about the outstanding debt MediaMath still owes some of these clients?
No company is looking to Infillion to repay debts owed to them by MediaMath. That happens through bankruptcy court.
What does MediaMath add to Infillion’s business?
MediaMath adds global scale to our business, which has been almost exclusively based in North America.
MediaMath also has strong self-service capabilities, whereas Infillion’s products are mostly available on a managed service basis. There’s a lot of demand from programmatic advertisers for self-service buying right now, so being able to offer that can help bring in new customers for Infillion.
What is the advantage of integrating MediaMath with Infillion’s ad products?
Infillion does hyper-localized ad targeting and closed-loop attribution, which can bring better campaign results to MediaMath customers.
What about AdCast, the DSP that Infillion already has?
We had AdCast handle campaign planning and buying for a while. But in 2018, we deprecated the bidding capability of AdCast and started working with third parties like The Trade Desk for buying instead. Infillion was a smaller company at the time; we couldn’t justify the costs of having our own DSP, although we were still using AdCast tech to set up campaign plans.
MediaMath has all the necessary aspects of a DSP: campaign planning and bidding plus technical integrations throughout the ad tech ecosystem.
Will there still be a need for AdCast after the integration?
AdCast has its own unique client integrations, so we may continue using it to power some advertising for media companies.
We may also eventually deprecate some of our own tech.
The goal is to keep the best assets of each tech stack – MediaMath’s and Infillion’s – but our integration plans aren’t set in stone yet.
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed.
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