Just days after Marin Software acquired France’s SocialMoov to build out is social media advertising reach comes one more social-ad-tech acquisition in the country. Perion Network has acquired MakeMeReach, a startup that lets mobile app developers extend ad campaigns to social media platforms.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed but a well-placed source close to Perion tells me was between $12 million and $13 million. Globes, the Israeli newspaper (Perion hails from Tel Aviv), put the price at $15 million, although we understand it’s lower.
Perion says that MakeMeReach, which is preferred marketing partner for both Facebook and Twitter, is profitable. The company, founded in 2009, had raised around $4.4 million in funding, according to our records.
The idea behind MakeMeReach is that it will extend Perion’s wider business not just in social but also mobile marketing and offering services to mobile developers, and specifically in Europe. The service will be combined with Grow Mobile — an acquisition Perion made last year for up to $42 million pending performance targets, not long after it went public in the year after a reverse merger with Conduit’s Client Connect business.
MakeMeReach’s main product, AdsOptim, is very comparable to what Grow Mobile was offering to developers in terms of being available as both a self-serve and fully managed platform. While Grow Mobile will continue to handle U.S. sales, the Paris-based office will now handle European sales. Customers for whom it manages social campaigns include Match.com, L’Occitane en Provence, Armani and GroupM.
“Acquiring MakeMeReach extends our position as one of the leading providers of mobile marketing technology,” said Shai Gottesdiener, GM of Perion’s mobile marketing division, in a statement. “MakeMeReach’s success in making it easy to advertise on social media is well aligned with Perion’s goal of providing developers with the most effective mobile advertising tools.” Those tools include ad rotation, campaign duplication, targeting templates, automated rules-generating and campaign generation.
The acquisition is significant for a few reasons. For one, it underscores yet again the push that ad companies are making for more cross-platform advertising, following the idea that it’s important to promote a product everywhere users spend time. That’s also good news for the likes of Twitter and Facebook, whose business models are predicated on this idea.
The other point that the acquisition highlights is France’s position overall in ad tech. Beyond MakeMeReach and SocialMoov, you have companies like Criteo, one of the biggest ad tech players of all.
MakeMeReach’s founder and CEO, Pierre-François Chiron, will be staying on to help Perion build its business in Europe.
“We are very excited to become a part of the Perion team and look forward to leveraging the vast resources of Perion as we continue to work towards making AdsOptim, as part of GrowMobile, the world’s best social media advertising tool,” he said in a statement.