Rocket Fuel, a programmatic ad network focused on providing performance advertising to digital marketers, today announced that it has entered a definitive agreement to acquire [x+1], an ad-tech firm with dual Demand side platform (DSP) and a data management platform (DMP) offering. The value of the total deal is $230 million.
Six months ago, Rocket Fuel had tried to bid for BlueKai but Oracle got there first. Rocket Fuel was searching for a decent DMP technology for a while now. Since the other major DMP player, Demdex was acquired by Adobe in 2011, this had left only [x+1] and Aggregate Knowledge, other 2 possible leaders in the DMP space, to be considered.
Rocket Fuel has a complete managed services offerings(except in Japan, where a self service model exists) for its clients wherein it runs their performance advertising campaigns. This takes away the headache of campaign management for the clients and need to invest in people, tech and processes. [x+1], which has a fantastic DSP+DMP product, on the other hand is a tech-only vendor with self serving offerings to its clients. This allows for a much greater control and customized execution to the campaigns.
Customers of both these companies is set to benefit from the amalgamation since Rocket Fuel gets access to world class technology which can power its offerings and [x+1] customers can look forward to the experience of Rocket Fuel in deriving success from the programmatic display advertising .Still a lot of future success will depend on the integration of technologies and the go-to market strategy of the combined entity.
This acquisition ,and a few others in this space in the last one year, also signals the growing need to provide a complete set of solutions for marketer's needs - starting from tag management and ending at marketing attribution. End to end solution also allows for a higher share of the marketer's wallet and his/her confidence in you. Quite frankly, no marketer would want to work with multiple technology and service vendors and spend their days in only correlating the data and information.
The display programmatic ad-tech space is still somewhat murky with a lot of point products solving small parts of the marketing puzzle. Consolidation is imminent and necessary for the growth of the category and we will see some more players getting acquired in the days to come.
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