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Seedtag Acquires Beachfront For Deeper Roots In TV And Streaming
Source: AdExchanger
June 3rd, 2024
Summary: Contextual ad platform Seedtag is buying private equity owned Beachfront, a CTV-focused supply-side platform (SSP) and ad server, with hopes that Beachfront will speed up its evolution into a CTV-led, full-stack marketing platform. Beachfront was an attractive acquisition target because it has direct integrations with TV and streaming publishers such as Comcast, Charter, AMC, Paramount, Univision, Vizio, and LG. Beachfront is expected to accelerate Madrid-based Seedtag’s US expansion and give Seedtag’s contextual ad products new demand and greater scale in CTV.
Seedtag entered the US market in 2022. It uses AI to power its contextual ad products and launched its first CTV-focused contextual ad product this year using automatic content recognition (ACR) data. It plans to access more ACR data through Beachfront's direct integrations with publishers.
Adding Beachfront’s ~30 employees will bring Seedtag’s global headcount to ~630. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Deal Grades:
Seedtag: A-
Beachfront: B (this grade should be an INCOMPLETE since we don’t know the price, but we’re giving them a B because they at least get out of private equity grind)
Opinion: This one is a bit of a head scratcher at first glance. “Contextual ad network buys CTV SSP and ad server.” Huh?
If we dig a bit deeper, though, Seedtag’s strategy starts making more sense. Seedtag has made its living selling contextual targeting technology on top of commoditized, open web supply. Given the deprecation of cookies and other user-level identifiers and given how precarious some of the newer "futureproof" identifiers seem, contextual feels like the only actual, 100% futureproof addressability solution for digital advertising. Seedtag is doubling-down on contextual by acquiring CTV-focused Beachfront, because context shines brightest in CTV. Buyers are comfortable buying context in CTV, because user-level addressability has never really been a thing in CTV. Also, it doesn't hurt that CTV is the hottest growth area in digital advertising. Kind of like Beachfront property?
Getting direct access to Beachfront’s CTV publishers gives Seedtag unique data and a technology hook directly into supply, something they didn’t have. Now they can offer an end-to-end, future-proof ad platform centered around two of the hottest growth areas that go hand-in-hand: contextual and CTV. We love the focus and the foresight! We’ve talked ourselves into it!
Seedtag probably didn’t pay a ton for Beachfront either, given how small their team is. Great deal for them. Now the only head scratcher is why Netflix didn’t buy Beachfront instead…
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