Uprise Marketing acquires technology firm VSIthinking to create new £1.2m business

As part of its growth strategy digital and creative marketing agency Uprise Marketing has acquired web development and technology company VSIthinking.

The acquisition by the Treforest-based firm creates new digital marketing and web-technology firm, UpriseVSI, with a combined turnover of £1.2m and a workforce of 21.

The value of the deal has not been disclosed.

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VSIthinking

Established in 1996 by its current managing director, Mark Thomas, Cardiff-Bay-based VSIthinking specialises in providing web development and software solutions for companies across a diverse range of industries.

It has developed a particularly strong reputation within the travel, leisure and sport sectors, where its clients include the likes of Thomas Cook, Neilson Holidays, The Celtic Manor Resort, Erna Low and Fulham Football Club.

VSIthinking has also developed a range of its own proprietary software products, which include a content management system, an e-commerce solution, online event booking software, a CRM system and project management software

The company also has expertise integrating existing client software systems and was recently appointed by The Celtic Manor Resort to undertake a integration of its various booking systems to create a bespoke, single view CRM system.

VSIthinking employ a team of 5 staff, all of whom will be retained within the new combined business.

Uprise Marketing

Founded in 2012, Uprise now employs 16. The company has grown to a team of 16, with clients including Microsoft, Paramount Office Interiors, Edwards Coaches, Park Plaza Cardiff, DS Smith, and Castell Howell.

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Gareth Rees Jones, managing director of Uprise Marketing, said, “The skills and experience within Uprise and VSIthinking complement each other perfectly, and will allow us to greatly accelerate our growth as a company.

Combining the creative, design and digital marketing skills within Uprise with the technology, back-end development and integration skills that VSI provide, will allow us to tender for larger, more complex web projects and provide our clients with a full end-to-end creative, web development and digital marketing solution.

Related story : New recruit to Uprise

We now have a fantastic opportunity to use our sales and marketing skills to help bring the solutions that UpriseVSI can offer to the attention of more companies both within Wales and beyond.”

Managing director of VSIthinking, Mr Thomas said: “It was obvious from the start that there was great synergy between the two companies and together we are greater than the sum of our parts, which is an exciting prospect.

“Our 18 years of technology innovation and our highly experienced team will provide both present and future clients of UpriseVSI with a robust, secure and scalable online platform.”

Fund and professional advisors

The deal was part-funded by a loan from Finance Wales who have also taken an equity stake in the new business.

Additional funding was provided by the two founders and majority shareholders in Uprise Marketing Mr Rees Jones, and finance director, Geoff Thomas, who will remain the major shareholders in the new combined UpriseVSI.

Geldards and KTS Owens Thomas acted for Uprise Marketing. Blake Morgan and Hugh James acting for VSIthinking and Broomfield Alexander, while and Hill Dickinson acted for Finance Wales.

Senior Investment executives Cenydd Rowlands and Stephen Galvin structured the company’s investment from Finance Wales. Mr Rowlands said, “The acquisition of VSIthinking by Uprise Marketing has created a strong agency, offering customers a comprehensive range of digital marketing services.

“South Wales has one of the UK’s fastest growing digital sectors and UpriseVSI will only strengthen its growing reputation.

“Finance Wales is pleased to back Uprise’s ambitious, high-calibre team. They have a wealth of expertise and our flexible equity and mezzanine funding package has enabled them to fund this exciting acquisition. We wish them well with their continued expansion and future growth.”

Uprise Marketing acquires technology firm VSIthinking to create new £1.2m business

eBay Enterprise Marketing Acquires AffiliateTraction, Expands Programmatic

eBay Enterprise Marketing Solutions will announce Monday the acquisition of AffiliateTraction to strengthen its hold on performance marketing and build out programmatic tools to support its affiliate marketing network.

While terms of the deal were not disclosed, eBay Enterprise Marketing Solutions CEO Michael Jones did reveal that the company’s focus is now turning to integrating technologies from AffiliateTraction, and Digital Net Agency, another recent acquisition in the past few months.

Jones says the AffiliateTraction acquisition will increase the “size of the business by more than 30%,” with operating expenses expected to rise “not more than 10%.”

AffiliateTraction’s technology manages affiliate programs through a set of tools — a feature that Jones calls “unique.” The software recommends the affiliates with which a retailer should work, and automates attribution and commissions by calculating the amount they should pay each affiliate.

The platform informs publishers about the best advertising partners by bringing in raw data about the retailer’s site traffic to determine characteristics such as the number of influencers who frequent the site.

The data serves up profiles of the traffic that might alert affiliates when they have better traffic than what they get credit for receiving. Or the merchant could make decisions on attribution that may not line up with what the traffic is worth.

Tom Barr, e-commerce director at MonkeySports, runs its affiliate program through AffiliateTraction on blogger sites to UPS.com. MonkeySports has become one in about 500 new clients to eBay Enterprise through the acquisition. The company, which sells hockey, baseball and lacrosse equipment online and offline, had been shifting some of its business to eBay Enterprise prior.

“The investment in affiliate marketing for us is between 1% and 2% of total sales,” Barr says. “The return is very good because we set the commission and AffiliateTraction has a fixed management fee.”

For each $1 MonkeySports invests the company gets back about $15, Barr says. MonkeySports also runs search advertising on engines, shopping ads, retargeting, and email marketing, 

Aside from the technology and dedicated clients, eBay Enterprise Marketing gains tons of data, about 100 employees, and an easier route to take its affiliate program global. 

While eBay Enterprise Marketing has a small operation in Europe, Greg Shepard, AffiliateTraction founder, who joins the company as chief strategy officer, says it puts “boots on the ground” for eBay Marketing Solutions in London, Toronto, Canada; Sydney Australia; and Santa Cruz, California.

The global position gives it a strong position to compete against affiliate programs rivals such as Conversant’s CJ Affiliate, and Rakuten Marketing’s LinkShare.

eBay Enterprise Marketing Acquires AffiliateTraction, Expands Programmatic

Taptica Acquires Facebook Marketing Partner AreaOne for $17 Million

Taptica, a mobile user acquisition platform, announced Tuesday the $17 million acquisition of Facebook Marketing Partner AreaOne.

AreaOne (formerly SocialClicks), a Facebook Marketing Partner for ad technology, will expand Taptica’s mobile offering into social media. It also brings in current clients such as Baido, IGG, ChangYou and Boyaa Interactive, and its proprietary A1 Platform.

Hagai Tal, Taptica’s CEO, commented on the acquisition in a press release:

AreaOne is one of the fastest growing and leading companies in social media integration, and we are excited to welcome their team. By marrying AreaOne’s social media marketing capabilities to Taptica’s existing Big Data expertise, we will be able to grow and leverage our existing database to include high quality media for our tier 1 client base.

AreaOne CEO Alon Michaeli is excited to join Taptica:

As advertisers increasingly seek to increase their level of social media advertising, AreaOne’s integration with Taptica will help meet that need, and the resulting integrated offering will give Taptica even more of a technological lead. We look forward to joining the Taptica family and drawing upon our unique strengths to provide the single platform that can best serve the industry.

Taptica Acquires Facebook Marketing Partner AreaOne for $17 Million

Gravity4 Makes 8th Acquisition; Acquires Largest Facebook Marketing Partner in Latin America that ...

SAN FRANCISCO, April 2, 2015 /PRNewswire/ — Gravity4, the world’s first High-Frequency Marketing OS, announced the acquisition of Ezlike, Inc. Ezlike is one of the largest Facebook Marketing Partners in Latin America, that did over $40 million in revenue last year. As a leader in building Facebook advertising products using the Native Ads API, the Company will be integrated within Gravity4’s existing native advertising platform. This marks Gravity4’s eighth acquisition in just nine months.

Ezlike is a three-year old company, which became a leader of Facebook advertising across Latin America by offering a fully automated self-service platform for Native Ads Optimization, DPA, and Custom Audiences for agencies and Fortune 500 brands. With this acquisition, Gravity4 will expand its Latin American footprint and broaden its prior acquisition of Triggit, which also had a significant presence in Brazil. As a part of the eighth acquisition, Xavier Mantilla, Gravity4’s GM of Latin America, will welcome the Ezlike team in Gravity4’s offices in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Gravity4 will also expand the offering and bring the Facebook’s Native Advertising product globally to its customers.

“I am honored to announce our 8th acquisition, Ezlike, one of the largest Facebook Marketing Partners in Latin America. We look forward in continuing to invest within the Facebook ecosystem and growing our global presence in a digital advertising world that is becoming automated by programmatic advertising. The combination of Ezlike, Triggit and our existing programmatic OS will allow us to bring the best of class enterprise software to marketers globally across every consumer touch point,” said Gurbaksh Chahal, Chairman and CEO of Gravity4.

“I’m excited to not only work with two great existing teams, Triggit and Ezlike that helped define the early years of online advertising in Latin America, but also excited for bringing the broader Gravity4 vision across Latin America. Being able to eliminate the middlemen and creating an automated self-serve platform where data is the new currency becomes a game-changer for the Latin American digital advertising landscape,” said, Xavier Mantilla, General Manager of Gravity4 Latin America.

“Ezlike has been a central partner for us to market, and maximize ROI across Facebook Ads through its automated self-serve automated platform. With phenomenal results month over month, we know Ezlike will continue to be a valuable partner for us and we look forward in seeing how we can expand our offerings with Gravity4’s fully integrated programmatic platform. We are excited to see the future of Ezlike as Gravity4 introduces its latest vision into our marketplace,” said, Alex Todres, Co–founder of ViajaNet.

About Gravity4 

Gravity4 is the world’s first High-Frequency Marketing OS integrated on one platform. Automation, Simplicity, and Design have been core ingredients in all of the technology it has brought to the marketplace. 

From day one, the Company’s goal has been to simplify marketing by humanizing the fundamental components behind it. Gravity4 offers a full suite of enterprise apps aggregating social, web, email, mobile, CRM and location data for free. This allows marketers to save millions of dollars annually and enhance automation across all consumer touch-points.

Gravity4 is a global software advertising company headquartered in San Francisco, CA with offices in Chicago, New York, Bermuda, Dublin, Sao Paulo and Istanbul. 

Make Your Brand Limitless.™

Photo – http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20150402/196293

 

SOURCE Gravity4, Inc.

Gravity4 Makes 8th Acquisition; Acquires Largest Facebook Marketing Partner in Latin America that ...

Google Acquires Toro, an Innovative Facebook Marketing Startup

The king of search engine Google has acquired Toro, a Facebook Mobile Marketing Startup based on San Francisco, California. Toro is developed by Red Hot Labs in March 2012, and its founders Amitt Mahajan, Joel Poloney and Dave Pekar worked really hard in last three years to make this startup a huge success in its niche. Toro helps app developers to market and promote their apps by offering best-in-class mobile marketing solution. Toro’s app marketing plans of setting up and optimizing the campaigns run only on the Facebook advertising platform. In short, Toro is a Facebook Marketing company exclusively for the app developers to help them promote their apps in Facebook in best possible way.

The parent company of Toro is Red Hot Labs, and its prime founders Amitt Mahajan and Joel Poloney previously joined hands in setting up MyMiniLife, and you may know that this is the company which played a very crucial role in the development of popular Facebook game Farmville, and this startup was later acquired by Zynga.

Toro helps its clients to optimize their respective Facebook Ad campaigns by creating and testing hundreds of different variants for each and every campaign seamlessly. Mobile App developers can run and manage their Facebook promotional ad campaign in a very easy way with the help of the service provided by Toro. Now, as Google acquired Toro, we may be able to see a much better version of Toro in upcoming days.

CEO and Founder of Toro Mr. Amitt Mahajan announced this Google acquisition via a blog post. He wrote, 

“With greater resources and distribution now available at our disposal, we’re excited to join Google and continue our mission of making the lives of app developers easier.”   

Toro has already raised $1.5 million fund from various investors like SV Angel, Andreesen Horowitz, General Catalyst, Greylock Partners, IT-Farm, Keith Rabois, Chris Dixon, Bill Tai, Matt Ocko and a few more. However, the financial terms of this Google-Toro acquisition is yet to be disclosed, and we’ll update this post if we get this information in coming days.

In that blog post Amitt Mahajan added, 

“For our existing marketing customers, we will continue to optimize your campaigns and update your dashboards, though campaign creation has been suspended for the time being. We recommend working with an alternative Facebook PMD for new campaigns going forward.”

It means Toro might be shifting its prime focus away from Facebook. Rather it wants to work on creating many new products while staying under the big umbrella of Google Inc. What’s your view point on this Google’s new acquisition of Toro? Let us in the comments section below.

Source: TechCrunch

Google Acquires Toro, an Innovative Facebook Marketing Startup

Marketing Pro Acquires Central Alabama Valpak Territory

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla., Feb. 24, 2015 /PRNewswire/ — Valpak, a leader in local print and digital coupons, announced today that Daniel and Ann Gallegly have acquired the existing Valpak of Central Alabama territory. With this territory, Valpak’s signature blue envelope will now mail to nearly 130,000 households in Birmingham, Jefferson and Shelby counties starting Feb. 16.

“Ann and I are thrilled to join the Valpak team, using our sales and marketing experience to bring savings to the members of our community,” said Daniel Gallegly, Valpak of Central Alabama franchisee. “The extensive support we receive from the Valpak network is truly amazing, and the brand’s business model is one we believe in. We look forward to growing our business and offering our consumers great ways to save through Valpak.”

Daniel and Ann were drawn to Valpak’s print and digital products and long track record of success in attracting a new generation of consumers while helping businesses grow. Prior to joining Valpak, Daniel was director of marketing for a regional home improvement company.

“The Gallegly’s bring nearly a decade of experience and knowledge in sales and marketing to Valpak,” said Greg Courchane, director of franchise sales for Valpak. “Their belief in the brand and desire to provide savings to their community positions them to succeed, and we look forward to watching their territory grow in the coming years.”

A leader in cooperative direct mail, Valpak mails over 20 billion coupons to nearly 40 million demographically targeted households per month in more than 100 markets in 45 states and four Canadian provinces. Today, in addition to its flagship blue envelope, the brand offers its business customers an impressive portfolio of digital advertising products including Smartphone apps, which are also integrated into the Samsung Wallet, iOS Passbook, Google Wallet and Windows Phone Wallet, as well as QR codes and online coupons to reach consumers at home, and on-the-go. Cox Target Media, providers of Valpak, also owns Savings.com, a leading online source for savings and personalized deals. Working together, Valpak and Savings.com offer consumers a more extensive selection of offers and a rewarding shopping experience as content is shared across platforms.

Ideal candidates for Valpak franchise ownership should possess a desire to join a trusted, industry-leading brand, work within a proven franchise system, develop relationships with local businesses and have a comfort level with selling new, digital technologies. Franchisees should also possess a minimum liquidity of $75,000, and a minimum net worth of $150,000.

For more information on advertising with Valpak of Central Alabama, please contact Daniel Gallegly at Daniel_Gallegly@valpak.com or (205) 405-0618.

For more information on Valpak franchise opportunities, please contact Greg Courchane at greg_courchane@valpak.com or (800) 678-2743 or visit www.valpakfranchising.com.

Discover more about Valpak®
Valpak is at the heart of communities across North America, helping people save, businesses grow and neighborhoods thrive through a network of local franchises in the U.S. and Canada. Our marketing consultants live and work in your neighborhood, and we can help you take the guesswork out of advertising with real-world marketing solutions that drive measurable results. From the mailbox to online to mobile devices, Valpak continues to find innovative ways to connect businesses with consumers. Monthly, close to 40 million homes receive The Blue Envelope® of savings and nearly 70 million shoppers visit valpak.com for coupon codes and offers. Backed by the muscle of Cox Target Media, Inc., your local Valpak office has the means and know-how to custom build a marketing campaign that meets your needs and budget. Let us introduce you to the neighborhood. Call Valpak at 1-800-676-6878.

About Cox Media Group
Cox Media Group is an integrated broadcasting, publishing, direct marketing and digital media company that includes the national advertising rep firms of CoxReps.  Additionally, CMG owns Cox Target Media, which operates Valpak, one of North America’s leading direct marketing companies, and Savings.com, a leading online source for savings.  The company’s operations currently include 14 broadcast television stations and one local cable channel, 59 radio stations, seven daily newspapers and more than a dozen non-daily publications, and more than 100 digital services.  CMG currently operates in more than 20 media markets and reaches approximately 52 million Americans weekly, including more than 31 million TV viewers, more than 3.5 million print and online newspaper readers, and more than 14 million radio listeners.  For more information about Cox Media Group, please check us out online at www.coxmediagroup.com.

CONTACT:
Andie Biederman
Fish Consulting
954-893-9150
abiederman@fish-consulting.com

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SOURCE Valpak

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Marketing Pro Acquires Central Alabama Valpak Territory