Social marketing and advertising software firm, Brand Networks, announced Thursday that it is acquiring Shift, a cross-network social advertising platform, for $50 million in cash and stock.
“Social marketing has evolved to become equal parts art and science,” said Jamie Tedford, Founder and CEO of Boston-based Brand Networks. “Simply providing workflow for content publishing and ads is table stakes today. The new challenge for marketers is to unlock the power of data to achieve true relevance — getting to the right person with the right content, at the right time, on the right device. Beginning today, marketers can now use a single platform to break down the walls between disparate teams, data silos, and content types to deliver relevant content across Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.”
Shift co-founder and CEO, James Borow, will join Brand Networks to serve as Chief Product Officer.
The company also announced the addition of RelevanceRank as part of the integration. The technology measures and predicts ongoing performance of paid and organic social media campaigns across Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn and surfaces the most relevant content to promote on each channel programmatically. The platform will also take advantage of Shift’s integration with Facebook’s Atlas for targeting and measuring advertising impact across devices and on offline channels.
The companies say that with the acquisition, Brand Networks will manage over $500 million in social advertising spend for more than 650 brands and agencies globally, including Interpublic Group, WPP, American Express, AT&T and Yahoo.
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