European advertising network Adconion Media Group, has acquired smartclip, a European digital video advertising firm for an undisclosed sum.
Adconion said that the acquisition will “significantly strengthen” its position in online video.
Smartclip adds around 500 new publisher sites to Adconion’s network.
According to Adconion, it will use the acquisition to help solidify its video advertising business, Joost, which is headquartered in Santa Monica.
Prior to this acquisition Adconion had a potential reach of 687m unique users monthly across its global platform or just over half the global online population. Now, with the inclusion of over 500 new publisher sites from the smartclip portfolio, this number will grow significantly as well as increase the Adconion global footprint to 17 countries worldwide.
According to Tyler Moebius, Founder and CEO of Adconion Media Group, this announcement will shake up the video market considerably as studios, agencies and advertisers are demanding the opportunity to hyper-syndicate more targeted content across multiple platforms than ever before.
“The addition of smartclip’s exclusive in-stream reach and Connected TV apps to our platform is an important development in growing the online video industry globally. We will now be providing advertisers an exclusive audience which they can reach in scale across in-banner, in-stream and Connected TV,” said Moebius.
“The online video and web TV market is incredibly fragmented across the globe and there is an extreme shortage of quality in-stream inventory. We’re seeing the same market evolution in video inventory that we experienced in premium display several years ago. Opportunistic vertical broker networks are popping up every day and are focused only on arbitrage, or brokering the same real estate and essentially adding no value to the advertisers, publishers or content partners. We are focused on providing technical solutions to our publishers, superior monetization for our content partners and exclusive audiences and deep user experiences at scale to our advertisers.”
“Adconion is both strategically and technologically a natural partner for us to accelerate and achieve smartclip’s next level of growth” said Jean-Pierre Fumagalli, co-founder and CEO of smartclip. “Both parties understand the evolution of audio visual media consumption and are committed to delivering to advertisers and agencies solutions for a digitally merged TV and online video experience on a global scale.”
With the acquisition of smartclip, Adconion will gain 118 employees in Europe and expand to 27 offices servicing clients throughout the UK, Germany, France, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy and Portugal in Western Europe; Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland in Northern Europe; and Russia.
