As Programmatic Buying Gains Steam, Centro Snaps Up SiteScout for $40 Million

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photoCentro, an ad tech company that develops media management software for advertisers, announced yesterday that it has acquired SiteScout, a self-serve advertising platform, for nearly $40 million in cash and stock. The move comes as programmatic ad buying continues to grow in the digital advertising space.

As a result of the deal, SiteScout’s team will be joining Centro, but will remain independent. Centro plans to invest significantly in SiteScout’s engineering talent. Initial plans include integrating SiteScout’s real-time-bidding (RTB) platform into Centro’s cloud base information suite, Centro Media Manager, which addresses the process of guaranteed media buys.

The deal essentially will merge SiteScout’s focus on RTB-based buys and Centro’s efforts to break down silos and eliminate complexities concerning digital ads into a single space. In order to do this, SiteScout’s technology will be embedded into the Centro Media Manager cloud app.

For Centro, the company’s vision for creating a single solution to address the entire spectrum of digital advertising was missing the programmatic buying component, which SiteScout has built. Centro believes its approach, which aims to addresses the complexities of digital ad buying from a single system, paired with a programmatic ad buying, will provide a holistic solution for marketers.

“The current model is not a tenable or scalable model for agencies or marketers. The attraction of programmatic buying is that it allows for the leveraging of technology to do the heavy lifting, and it is seeing such scale with the projected growth pretty significant,” Centro CMO Kelly Wenzel told Street Fight. “With the acquisition, marketers trying to drive brand awareness or work on a direct-response marketing campaign to drive conversion, can now do that from a single system.”

Programmatic buying has increased in popularity over the past few years, with marketers projected to spend $3.34 billion on RTB this year, a 73.9% jump from a year earlier, according to data from eMarketer. The data also revealed a rise in mobile display advertising is also set to grow with marketers spending $3.81 billion this year.

As programmatic buying rises in the digital space, its impact on local has been tremendous, says Wenzel: “Programmatic buying has already been a big part of local. The fact that you can apply technology to not only automate the process but to hyper-target individual impressions in individual locations based on device is pretty powerful.”

Myriah Towner is an intern at Street Fight.

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