Advertising software and services company Mediaocean this month announced a plan to buy advertising tech company Innovid for $500 million. The deal, which is expected to close early next year, expands Mediaocean’s ability to offer brands control over their data and where their ad spending goes.
For Zvika Netter, co-founder and chief executive of Innovid, the acquisition marks the culmination of a growth strategy to transform video advertising as streaming became more popular.
“It’s a great time to join forces and really provide an alternative, unbiased global, omnichannel option for the customers, brands and agencies mostly,” Netter said in this interview with Beet.TV. “Ad serving, while many look at it as pipes and infrastructure, it is very critical infrastructure, but it’s also the source of truth. It’s where the data, it’s the only place in the ad tech stack for a brand or an agency.”
The deal will merge Mediaocean’s Flashtalking business with Innvoid to create a full stack platform with ad serving, creative optimization and measurement, among other tools. In 2022, Innovid bought ad measurement and attribution platform TVSquared for $160 million.
“It’s a new industry, it’s growing extremely fast,” Netter said. “There’re billions of dollars now with Netflix and Amazon adding more and more advertising to the broadcast on a global scale. “There’s a massive opportunity to use our technology and our innovation combined with the scale of Mediaocean.”
