Yahoo Buys Admovate, Motivated to Regain Respect and Marketshare
posted Sunday Jul 28, 2013 by Nicholas DiMeo
Ever since Yahoo's new CEO Marissa Mayer took over in October, several things have drastically changed. First, Mayer completely changed the company's focus and mentality. Then, there's been several rounds of closing non-profitable projects while also improving some and even spending billions to acquire new brands. Yahoo has continued to push forward as the company has picked up yet another startup.
Admovate has been purchased by Yahoo to help them grow their mobile advertising sales, as well as expand their targets ads. As of now, we're unsure of the terms of the deal, but we do know that four employees over at Admovate's HQ in Mountain View, CA will be heading four miles west to Sunnyvale to join Yahoo's ad team. Admovate says that are able to allow advertisers the ability to not only create ads, but then be able to pinpoint the "hyper-local" ad to customers in the mobile space.
Scott Burke, SVP of display advertising and ad technology, said in a blog post (which was posted on Tumblr, by the way) on the acquisition,
Today, we're excited to announce the acquisition of Admovate, an advanced mobile ad technology startup. Admovate has created sophisticated technology that helps marketers reach their desired audience at the right time and place.This is especially important for mobile ad experiences that engage consumers on smaller screens.
This acquisition is part of our efforts to invest further in our ad tech platforms-Apt, Genome, and Right Media-and make buying easier for advertisers and agencies. Admovate's personalization technology accelerates our capabilities in mobile advertising, and we gain an exceptionally talented technical team. Admovate's engineers will join our Yahoo! display advertising team in Sunnyvale.
This is important move for Yahoo, as their ad revenue dropped by over 11 percent last quarter, per their earnings report last week. Interestingly enough, this acquisitions doesn't come too far after Yahoo partnered with Google back in February, to bring more ads to Yahoo's Internet brands. Now with a mobile partner, we should expect to see some new, creative ways for Yahoo to try and gain back some relevancy. This also makes sense as Yahoo owns Right Media Exchange, which is an ad-buying program for companies looking to get their message out across the Web.
Mayer has also been very upfront about her mission to make Yahoo competitive again, saying that they would "continue the pack of doing these smaller deals" in the future. Those smaller deals include acquisitions throughout the year of Xobni, Tumblr, GoPollGo and Astrid, among others.
