MediaMath has snapped up Rare Crowds, a small, 2-year-old startup founded by ad tech trailblazer Eric Picard, AdExchanger has learned.
Under the all-stock transaction, Picard will join MediaMath as VP of strategic partnerships as the media-buying platform builds out products around private marketplaces and “automated guaranteed” inventory (i.e., direct site buys).
The deal has the markings of an acqui-hire. Picard, whose title at MediaMath will be VP of strategic partnerships, is the only exec from Rare Crowds’ small team going over to MediaMath. Co-founder and CTO Scott Tomlin will consult with MediaMath through the transfer of Rare Crowds’ technology.
A well-known figure in the ad tech space, Picard founded Bluestreak, an early ad server and rich media platform. Later he was an architect of Microsoft’s ad platform strategy, and he also held a senior product role at TRAFFIQ before that company exited ad tech and repositioned as an agency.
His responsibilities at MediaMath will include oversight of the company’s relationship with Akamai, from which it acquired Advertising Decision Sciences – along with its pixel-free ad targeting technology – in January 2013.
“MediaMath is making an investment in moving beyond real-time bidding, and taking RTB technologies really far forward into other parts of the ecosystem,” Picard told AdExchanger. “The company is investing in the rest of the media plan that is not currently accessible.”
Rare Crowds was initially focused on helping publishers better package their inventory in a programmatic selling environment, but in the last year pivoted to the buy side.
Here’s how Picard described the Rare Crowds value proposition in an AdExchanger interview two years ago:
“The whole industry has been very focused on prediction. We have to predict how much inventory we are going to have so we can sell it in advance, when you are talking about premium inventory. In RTB, all of the systems that have been developed really allow you to target much better and do not have to worry about prediction.
We’re finding this hypertargeted inventory that has more than four attributes, that’s what we define as a ‘rare crowd,’ all the way out to 12 or 15 or 20 attributes. If it exists, we’ll find it.”
Rare Crowds was backed by angel investors including Hulu’s SVP for ad sales, Peter Naylor, Interactive Advertising Bureau founder Rich LeFurgy and Mediasmith CEO Dave Smith.
