We are pleased to announce that Integral Ad Science (Nasdaq: IAS), a global leader in digital media quality, announced that it has acquired Publica LLC (“Publica”), the connected TV advertising platform, in a cash and stock deal valued at $220 million. With this acquisition, IAS is accelerating its CTV strategy to help publishers better monetize their video programming across CTV devices, while building new tools to provide advertisers with much-needed transparency into the quality of this inventory.

“CTV viewership and programmatic advertising have skyrocketed, and by acquiring Publica we’re accelerating our growth to offer publishers the tools to capitalize on this opportunity,” said Lisa Utzschneider, CEO, IAS. “Advanced data and technology will fuel the future of addressable CTV advertising. Now video publishers can increase their revenue, and in the future we will help advertisers with a trusted way to measure the results of their growing CTV budgets. In fact, Publica reports that publishers using its platform have seen on average a 30% lift in yield for their CTV inventory. I welcome Ben and the Publica team as we innovate together to increase CTV advertising quality and impact.”           

Publica is a leading Connected TV (CTV) ad platform and works with many of the world’s biggest broadcasters, TV manufacturers, and OTT apps. Headquartered in Palo Alto, Publica provides solutions for publishers to maximize revenues across their CTV inventory through key solutions including a Unified Auction, Ad Pod Management, Audience Management, and Server-Side Ad Insertion (SSAI). Publica serves over 3 billion ads on CTV every month. By acquiring Publica, IAS adds a talented team with decades of experience building leading video CTV advertising products, while delivering results for some of the world’s largest publishers. Publica Co-Founder and CEO, Ben Antier, will now report directly to Lisa Utzschneider. The Publica brand will become part of IAS’s product portfolio.

“Audiences have already switched to watching CTV and more ad-supported content than ever; by joining IAS, we’re offering a trusted platform for brands and publishers to drive more ad dollars towards CTV,” said Ben Antier. “We have a joint vision to transform CTV advertising with a data-driven approach that benefits the entire industry, while delivering an exceptional user experience.”

LUMA advised Publica on the transaction.

We’re pleased to announce Vungle, a leading mobile performance marketing platform, has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire JetFuel, an influencer marketing platform headquartered in San Francisco. JetFuel enables app developers and other advertisers to scale marketing campaigns across a network of over 15,000 fully-verified influencers, with a combined reach of over 4 billion Instagram followers, 1.5 billion TikTok followers, and 100 million daily Snapchat views.

The global influencer market is expected to be worth $13.8 billion in 2021, up from $1.7 billion in 2016¹, a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 52%. Advertisers continue to invest a larger share of their marketing budget in influencer marketing each year. JetFuel has innovated in this space by automating campaign management and execution, removing the need for the time-consuming manual work that is characteristic of traditional influencer marketing. The company charges advertisers on a cost-per-action (CPA) basis, ensuring that advertisers achieve measurable outcomes with high ROI. JetFuel also empowers influencers to create authentic, custom promotions that drive strong results.

As Vungle continues to expand the breadth of its mobile performance marketing platform, JetFuel enables Vungle to offer advertisers even greater reach in acquiring high-value users and the ability to target the increasingly valuable Gen Z market through engaging, influencer-owned viral content that drives action.

“JetFuel brings strong technical expertise and commercial success in social media and influencer marketing, creating a unique and valuable extension to our performance marketing platform that will empower not only our current customers but the next generation of digital entrepreneurs,” said Jeremy Bondy, CEO of Vungle. “We’ve been in awe of the company’s innovative, market-leading platform and the forward-thinking vision that makes the combination of Vungle and JetFuel so natural.”

“During our conversations, it became clear that there’d be huge benefits to pairing up with an ad tech leader like Vungle. There’s a lot of similarities between our businesses,” said Tim Lenardo, CEO of JetFuel. “Many of the problems we’re solving in influencer marketing now are the problems that they’ve spent the past 10 years solving in mobile. It’s amazing how closely Vungle’s capabilities line up with our product roadmap! Tapping into their expertise will supercharge our development and drive further differentiation in how we can serve our customers.”

LUMA advised JetFuel on the transaction.

Chartboost, a leading mobile programmatic advertising and monetization platform has entered a definitive agreement to be acquired by Zynga Inc., a global leader in interactive entertainment. Along with its talented team, Chartboost brings a global audience of more than 700 million monthly users and more than 90 billion monthly advertising auctions. Together, Zynga and Chartboost possess all the elements of a complete, next generation platform: high-quality content, direct player relationships, massive reach and full-stack advertising technology that can be applied across Zynga’s game portfolio and Chartboost’s advertising partners.

Chartboost is a unified advertising platform that includes a Demand Side Platform (DSP) as well as Supply Side Platform (SSP) and mediation capabilities delivered through an SDK solution. By leveraging advanced machine learning and data science capabilities, Chartboost brings together premium inventory, global scale and audience-based targeting to optimize programmatic advertising and yields.

“Chartboost is one of the most dynamic monetization and discovery platforms in mobile, and we could not be more excited to welcome their talented team to our company,” said Frank Gibeau, Chief Executive Officer of Zynga. “By combining Zynga’s high-quality games portfolio and first-party data with Chartboost’s proven advertising and monetization platform, we will create a new level of audience scale and meaningfully enhance our competitive advantage in the mobile ecosystem.”

We are thrilled to join with Zynga to further build and expand our full stack advertising platform that will serve Zynga and the entire mobile ecosystem,” said Rich Izzo, Chief Executive Officer of Chartboost. “Together, we share a vision of the future where a combined advertising, analytics and content platform will accelerate growth across both of our companies. Zynga already feels like family and an extension of our own company culture.”

LUMA advised Chartboost on the Transaction.

We are pleased to announce that Magnite, the largest independent sell-side advertising platform, has acquired SpotX from RTL Group for $1.17 billion in cash and stock. SpotX is one of the leading platforms shaping CTV and video advertising globally.

Together, Magnite and SpotX will create the largest independent CTV and video advertising platform in the programmatic marketplace. The combined company will provide better support for sellers, create an alternative to the CTV advertising market’s largest players, and will greatly improve scale and efficiency for buyers.

Magnite’s expanded technical capabilities and teams will offer swift solutions that cater to a broader set of client needs, including sellers that are newer to the world of programmatic and those who have mature, programmatic-only operations. Likewise, the acquisition will make it easier for brands and agencies to buy premium CTV inventory at scale with standard features and a single, addressable pool of audiences.

LUMA believes we will see more deal activity in CTV as strategics default to inorganic growth initiatives in order to timely capitalize on the significant inflection in the sector brought about by the pandemic. Beneficiaries of this accelerated focus are likely to span a variety of companies including media, distribution, monetization, workflow, data and analytics.

LUMA advised Magnite on the transaction.

We are pleased to announce that Vungle, a leading mobile performance advertising platform, has acquired GameRefinery, an industry-leading SaaS mobile gaming analytics company headquartered in Finland. GameRefinery’s Game Intelligence platform provides developers with retention and monetization insights through its cloud-based developer tools for world-class studios such as Zynga, King, Rovio, Ubisoft and more. The company’s deep contextual data sets across 160,000+ gaming apps bring unique and innovative targeting capabilities to Vungle’s platform, helping advertisers deliver contextually relevant campaigns and increase user acquisition performance in today’s privacy-focused, post-IDFA landscape.

GameRefinery also brings image recognition and creative tagging capabilities that will be leveraged by Vungle Creative Labs (VCL). Combining VCL’s extensive experience in cutting-edge creative and UA, with granular reporting on visual elements including styles and genre fit, provides industry-leading performance recommendations for its biggest customers.

Vungle CEO Jeremy Bondy stated, “Together, Vungle, GameRefinery, and Algolift offer the only platform that speaks to game and product teams in the development process, marketing, UA, and growth teams in the scaling stage, and data teams when measuring and refining outcomes.”

LUMA advised Vungle on the transaction.