Perhaps adding to its ‘quiver’ of PointRoll, Ripple6, ShopLocal and a few others, media company Gannett will continue to plunge into marketing and ad technology and will acquire social ad platform BLiNQ Media according to TechCrunch. Read it.
TechCrunch’s Josh Constine and Ingrid Lunden point out Gannett’s BLiNQ acquisition echoes Washington Post Co’s Social Code (AdExchanger Q&A) investment. TechCrunch adds that similar to SocialCode’s acquition of the Digg engineering team, Gannett wants BLiNQ’s team…
- “TechCrunch understands that in addition to David Nicol Williams, the co-founder and CEO of BLiNQ, Gannett was also interested in startup’s engineering team, led by CTO, Luis Caballero, who had also built up the engineering team at Vitrue. (Both companies are based in Atlanta, Georgia, which it turns out is something of a hotbed for social media marketing. Who knew?) TechCrunch understands that like Vitrue, BLiNQ has some IP that it is patenting. BLiNQ’s is centered around media optimization algorithms.”
From a May 2010 interview with AdExchanger, BLiNQ CEO Dave Williams, who co-founded 360i, explained his company’s early promise:
- “We make it easy for big brands and agencies to produce break-through results on social networks, such as Facebook. Right now, it is very difficult to effectively manage and optimize large-scale social media ad campaigns on Facebook and other social networks. We are solving this challenge with a powerful and easy-to-use media management solution. Our technology solution is called BLiNQ Ad Manager (BAM) and is in private beta release right now.”
Considering the recent acquisitions of Vitrue, Buddy Media and Wildfire, the social ad space could not be hotter. What will be interesting to see is if the $92 million price tag reported by TechCrunch turns out to be true. The ceiling may be getting lower for social ad platforms riding the Facebook Ad API wave.
A PR representative says that BLiNQ doesn’t comment on rumors.
