Online marketing services company ValueClick has agreed to acquire display advertising company Dotomi for roughly $295 million in cash and stock, the company said on August 2. The acquisition is expected to close by the end of August. This marks its second acquisition this year.
“Dotomi expands our branded display capabilities and direct advertising relationships and offers significant cross selling synergies with our other divisions,” said ValueClick CEO Jim Zarley, during a conference call on August 2.
Zarley said that Dotomi provides ValueClick with “strategic relationships” with more than 100 advertisers and that ValueClick had been planning to expand its business into real-time dynamic display advertising. Dotomi specializes in the creation and distribution of display ad units that are personalized in accordance with anonymized user data and impression data.
“We’ve always talked about moving ValueClick from direct response more into branding and video and mobile, and at the very high end of the funnel is the dynamic messaging component that Dotomi has done very well,” said Zarley. He said it would have taken ValueClick years to develop the dynamic display capabilities in-house and scale them to level of Dotomi.
Dotomi CEO John Giuliani will retain his role and will report directly to Zarley. Dotomi will operate as a wholly-owned subsidiary of ValueClick. Dotomi maintains 160 employees, and Zarley said that he expects that base to grow to over 200 employees by the end of the year.
ValueClick also said on April 25 that it had acquired mobile ad network Greystripe. Gary Fuges, VP of corporate development and investor relations at ValueClick, told Direct Marketing News at the time that the Greystripe acquisition would expand ValueClick’s brand advertising capabilities.
