Ad technology firm, Rubicon Project, announced Wednesday that it is buying intent-marketing start-up Chango for about $122 million. This marks the seventh acquisition for Rubicon Project, and yet more consolidation in the ad tech market.
Toronto-based Chango’s intent-marketing technology harnesses behavioral, contextual and search data to target, and retarget, ads programmatically across the web.
“The Chango acquisition will enable Rubicon Project to expand its premium advertising marketplace with intent marketing technology that includes access to keyword, contextual targeting and retargeting budgets. Through this acquisition the company will bring access to an additional $35 Billion of intent marketing spend to the Rubicon Project marketplace,” said the company in the announcement.
Chango technology will be integrated into Rubicon Project’s Buyer Cloud. The acquisition dovetails with the company’s programmatic direct capabilities — enabled through its other acquisitions of iSocket and Shiny Ads — and bring more premium advertisers to its Buyer Cloud. Chango reports its customers include more than 60 of the Fortune 500 advertisers.
“Chango’s technology brings keyword, contextual targeting and retargeting to premium display, mobile and video advertising.,” said Frank Addante, CEO, Founder & Chief Product Architect, Rubicon Project. “This will enable us to bring intent marketing budgets to an independent, open marketplace that serves premium buyers and sellers at scale for the first time.”
Chango processes more than one trillian page views per month and billions of search queries from Google, Yahoo and Bing. It pairs up search query data with contextual data from a webpage or app page to target users with ads for products and services for which they’ve demonstrated intent through search and content. Rubicon Project, which has operated on a CPM model, will add cost-per-click and cost-per-acquisition pricing to its offerings with Chango, to facilitate both branding and performance advertising.
Intent marketing is a growing ad tech segment. Last June, intent marketing platform Yieldbot raised $18 million in Series B funding. Chango had raised over $18 million in four rounds before the acquisition.
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