Rubicon Project to Acquire Chango for $122m

Addante:
Addante: “Acquisition will enable us to bring intent marketing budgets to an independent, open marketplace that serves premium buyers and sellers at scale”

Ad tech automation firm Rubicon Project is to acquire search and website retargeting firm Chango for $122m (£82m), primarily in stock. Chango’s tech processes 1 trillion page views and billions of search events per month from engines including Google, Yahoo and Bing. It takes basic keyword search data and delivers ads to consumers based on both the initial search, plus the contextual information from the content on a website or application’s page. The end result is an integration of search keyword and premium contextual targeting capabilities.

Rubicon says the Chango acquisition will enable it to expand its premium advertising marketplace with intent marketing technology that includes access to keyword, contextual targeting and retargeting budgets. It adds that the acquisition will bring access to an additional $35bn of intent marketing spend to the Rubicon Project marketplace.

The company says also that the acquisition will reinforce its direct order automation technology and rapidly expand its Buyer Cloud initiatives, specifically through the advancement of its Orders (Guaranteed Orders and Non-Guaranteed Orders) platform. It will also increase direct integrations with premium brands and agencies that constitute a large base of Chango’s current customers, including more than 60 of the Fortune 500 advertisers. Finally, says Rubicon, the acquisition will enable it to expand its price offerings in the future, evolving from a purely CPM model to incorporate CPC and CPA offerings currently under development by Chango.

“The team at Chango has done an extraordinary job engineering and deploying their intent marketing technology; they have built terrific products and a stellar team,” said Frank Addante, Rubicon CEO, founder and chief product architect. “Chango’s technology brings keyword, contextual targeting and retargeting to premium display, mobile and video advertising. This will enable us to bring intent marketing budgets to an independent, open marketplace that serves premium buyers and sellers at scale for the first time.”