GroundTruth Acquires Self-Serve Local Ad Platform Addy

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Location-based marketing tech company GroundTruth is buying Addy, a digital local advertising firm. GroundTruth announced the acquisition this morning. It will help the firm better serve smaller customers.

Why GroundTruth is buying Addy

The acquisition is part of GroundTruth’s push to equip small businesses with the kinds of location marketing and ad tech-driven solutions previously available only to big brands. GroundTruth serves customers large and small.

Many of GroundTruth’s larger customers “have marketing and agency resources dedicated to advanced, analytical data sources such as GroundTruth’s offline behavioral intelligence,” Rosie O’Meara, chief revenue officer at GroundTruth, told Street Fight. “In comparison, small business owners who are already wearing multiple organizational hats have very little time to dedicate to marketing.”

O’Meara said that for small businesses, this acquisition “changes all that. Small businesses will be able to buy location-based advertising very similarly to how they shop for products and services online: a step-by-step targeting and ad selection process and seamless checkout.”

What SMBs can do with location marketing

O’Meara offered two major types of use cases for SMBs investing in location marketing:

  • “Reaching customers based on their interests and the places they visit. This type of marketing tactic can help small businesses be more targeted with their campaigns and understand the best media channels for engaging with them.
  • We also offer ways for small businesses to reach customers who are nearby using proximity targeting. It’s especially effective in acquiring new customers and competitor customers.”

She added that GroundTruth offers “performance-driven models” so that small businesses, which tend to have tight marketing budgets, only pay for solutions that drive results.

The big picture

E-commerce has undergone an unprecedented boom since the start of the pandemic. With customers increasingly turning online for products, the local advantage risks diminishing even further for small businesses that have been struggling against Amazon and Walmart for a decade or more.

Therein lies a major opportunity for marketing tech firms. It’s hard to pitch a small businesses focused on the digital basics on martech. But the case has never been stronger that small businesses need the extra customer acquisition power. And the pandemic showed even digital laggards that digital features such as curbside pickup and BOPIS are no longer luxuries.

For the martech firms, the industry is maturing, and marketing spend is still recovering. More acquisitions like this one are on the way.

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Joe Zappa is the Managing Editor of Street Fight. He has spearheaded the newsroom's editorial operations since 2018. Joe is an ad/martech veteran who has covered the space since 2015. You can contact him at [email protected]