whats the most important web2 acquisition to date?
So 24/7 Meda was just bought by WPP and the world has barely noticed.
"24/7 Real Media (Nasdaq:TFSM) is being bought by WPP Group Plc. (NYSE:WPP), marketing services company by revenue, for $649 million to beef up its presence in the fastest growing segment of the advertising market. WPP said on Thursday its GroupM agency expects online advertising to exceed $33 billion this year, or more than 8 percent of global ad spending, and is seen growing strongly in the future. 24/7 Real Media’s shares gained 3.8%." - 123jump.com.
Why is this so important? After all 24/7 Media is the other other white meat of online ad networks after Google & DoubleClick, while WPP is the world's 2nd largest marketing conglomerate after Omnicom. WPP has its roots firmly planted in the glamorously traditional world of tv, radio & press which on the surface is a bit of an odd fit.
Well 24/7 do have some rather neat stuff in the engine room, technology that has evolved over one and a bit decades. Back in the last boom I had the fortune of working with some of the guys that built some of their ad serving software - people that later went on to build Google's AdWords platform.
WPP bought this technology so they could have a unified technology platform to manage data across all their clients, globally.
This deal really marks the point in time when the marketing world has finally climbed to the top of the hill and announced to the world that the times are changing.
Welcome to Marketing 2.0.