By Michael Liedtke, Technology Writer
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) --Google Inc. has struck a deal to buy Admeld, a service that helps websites make more money from online advertising.
The agreement announced Monday positions Google to add another potentially valuable weapon to its advertising arsenal. Google already sells the most advertising on the Internet. The company’s total ad revenue is expected to surpass $30 billion this year — greater than the entire U.S. newspaper industry.
For that reason, the proposed acquisition of Admeld may face more regulatory scrutiny than most deals of its size do.
Financial terms of the Admeld agreement weren’t disclosed, an indication that Google isn’t paying a high enough price for the proposed acquisition to be considered a major financial event.
Founded three years ago, privately held Admeld employs about 100 workers at its New York headquarters and other offices in San Francisco, London, Berlin and Toronto.
Admeld’s service is focused on marketing campaigns that promote brands and typically feature imagery. The format is known as display advertising, an area where Google Inc. has been gaining market share since its $3.2 billion acquisition of DoubleClick Inc. in 2008.
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission spent a year examining the DoubleClick deal, still the largest acquisition in Google’s 13-year history.
Google has been building its display advertising business to supplement its dominance of Internet search and the text-based ads that run alongside search results as well as other Web content.
The diversification has been working out so well that the research firm IDC said Google surpassed the Internet’s long-time display advertising leader, Yahoo Inc., during the first three months of this year. IDC estimated Google held 14.7 percent of the U.S. online display ad market in the first quarter, followed by Yahoo at 12.3 percent and Facebook at 8.8 percent.
“Together with Admeld, we hope to make display advertising simpler, more efficient and more valuable,” Neal Mohan, Google’s vice president of display advertising, wrote in a Monday post on Google’s blog.
Admeld works with websites to help them figure out how to make the most money from the amount of space they have available to show display ads. Its list of customers includes News Corp., IAC/InterActiveCorp., Thomson Reuters Corp. and Pandora Media Inc., which is preparing to go public this week.
Google didn’t specify a timetable for closing the Admeld acquisition. The company’s executives have repeatedly said they expect regulators around the world to take more time poring over how Google’s acquisitions might affect competition on the Internet.
The intensified scrutiny hasn’t curbed Google’s appetite for acquisitions. Since the end of 2009, Google has spent more than $2.6 billion buying more than 60 companies.
Effie UK and Ipsos Report Concludes Marketing Industry Should Do Its Part To Heal Societal Divisions
Society has never been more divided, according to a new report Healing the Divide in which Effie UK and brand and advertising experts from Ipsos explored brands’ role in shaping society and healing societal divisions.
The report details how instability, inflation, and COVID recovery —the convergence of multiple interconnected crises around the world that coincide with and amplify each other, causing hard to resolve systemic challenges, have become the norm over the past few years. As a result, the use of division as a weapon is now a major theme in today’s culture and politics, and sadly 47% of the UK and 49% of the US agree with the statement that “Within my lifetime, society in my country will break down,” according to Ipsos Global Trends 2024.
While some brands have tried to respond to this, the report finds responsible marketing is now threatened by weaponized division. It points to the World Federation of Advertisers’ decision to shut down the Global Alliance for Responsible Media following an antitrust lawsuit filed by Elon Musk’s X, combined with DEI rollbacks, as significant setbacks.
The report says these setbacks underline the importance of marketing in solving collective problems, such as climate change, food security, and harmful online content. It also points to a need for marketers to take more interest in and more responsibility for healing divisions.
Research claims marketers are ideally placed to build and rebuild the antidote to division (trust, empathy, a sense of control, connection and collaboration). According to the Ipsos Veracity index of trusted professionals, society is becoming more trustworthy of advertising executives. Additionally, 57% of Britons agree that brands should communicate their... Read More