To err is human.
Unfortunately, human errors such as adding a slipped decimal can tank a digital media buyer’s campaign. Reduce the error rate, and media buying becomes more efficient.
To that end, on Monday, the UK programmatic buying company MiQ acquired SaaS compliance platform Grasp. MiQ declined to disclose the financial terms of the deal.
MiQ’s quality assurance product catches most campaign mistakes, such as when there’s an incorrect content setup, geolocation, budget flight dates, campaign name or a mix-up involving the site tag.
While the workflow, operations support and process problems Grasp purports to solve aren’t trendy, they’re “the plumbing and pipes of every dollar that ever gets invested, transacted and spent,” said Paul Silver, global president of corporate development at MiQ.
Alert, alert
The tool is available as a browser extension in Chrome and Microsoft Edge, but Grasp also connects to client APIs to trigger noncompliance alerts, said Pierre-Lou Dominjon, Grasp’s co-founder and CEO. Its dashboard shows the client’s overall compliance and breaks down compliance adoption by market, user, team and guideline.
One common issue on the agency side is campaign overspend, Dominjon said. For instance, say an advertiser creates a three-month Facebook campaign with a $10,000 budget. It’s easy within the Meta UI to leave the “daily” budget setting checked instead of the lifetime budget. Grasp’s software overlay would flag the information and prompt them to check their settings.
Separation of software and service
For MiQ, it’s important to have a complementary software business that doesn’t erode its core services business model.
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“We will make it easy for [overlapping] customers to transact with us when they’re looking for both service and software,” Silver said. “We don’t want to dilute our own business with a software arm,” though, he added.
Ad tech is filled with examples of service businesses with a software arm that ended up consuming the main business, he said. Take Rocket Fuel, a high-performing ad tech services business that spun off a SaaS business under pressure from investors and ended up going down in flames.
“We haven’t built a DSP, a CDP or any sort of three-letter acronym that tries to disintermediate the services we provide in programmatic,” Silver said.
More customers within their grasp
Founded in 2020, Grasp was a bootstrapped company. Its entire team of about 10 people is joining MiQ – more of an acqui-hire, considering MiQ has more than 1,200 employees. Grasp will continue to operate as a standalone unit, though. In the coming years, it plans to develop tools that “close the loop between media planning, execution and reporting” and tackle budgeting, Dominjon said. It may also expand to CRM and email.
MiQ and Grasp share a number of clients, including the major holding companies, but MiQ works with hundreds of independent regional agencies, too, which could help grow Grasp’s footprint.
Acquisition mission
The Grasp acquisition follows MiQ’s acquisition of publisher audience platform AirGrid in 2022, two months after an investment from British private equity firm Bridgepoint.
The Bridgepoint investment was MiQ’s second time going the private equity route, after ECI Partners invested in 2017.
Private equity supports MiQ’s desire to be independent, Silver said.
MiQ also inked a multiyear partnership with Samba TV in January to manage its media sales business.
And the company isn’t done, either. Silver teased more M&A activity on the horizon in the next 12 to 18 months.
“We’ve having to create the deal flow, because there isn’t much happening organically,” he said. “But the best companies that you can buy are often not for sale.”
