Curate Mobile acquires Juice Mobile to bridge branding with ad performance

Brief:

Mobile ad agency Curate Mobile announced plans to acquire Canadian adtech firm Juice Mobile, according to a statement shared with Mobile Marketer. The combination of the two companies aims to provide greater transparency, scale and control of mobile ad campaigns, among other services.
Juice Mobile's DSP and DMP services will be combined with Curate’s proprietary ad stack, with the deal expected to be finalized by Jan. 1, 2019. Marc Porcelli, founder and CEO of Curate Mobile, said the agreement with Juice will help create a "holistic mobile growth solution" that bridges the gap between branding and ad performance.
Curate has a proprietary real-time fraud detection system and ad-yield management that focuses on key performance indicators. The firm's machine learning algorithms aim to optimize ad bidding by making billions of automated ad-buying decisions a day.

Insight:

The combination of Curate and Juice enables the companies to combine their specific skill sets to provide a broader range of mobile ad solutions. Mobile advertising in the U.S. is expected to surpass TV ad spending by more than $6 billion this year, eMarketer estimates. The gap will widen by 2022 as mobile spending reaches $141 billion, compared to $68 billion on TV. Companies like Curate will need to offer a broad range of ad solutions in this growing space, and acquiring other companies to add services and offerings is a quick way to do so.

The agreement comes as the adtech industry consolidates, with several high-profile deals being announced in the past year. Sprint last month sold its mobile advertising platform Pinsight Media to ad tech company InMobi, which plans to combine Pinsight's network-level mobile data with information from apps and mobile web browsers, according to a company announcement. Pinsight uses data from wireless carriers to help marketers reach target audiences on smartphones.

Similarly, AT&T in June acquired ad technology company AppNexus, which runs one of the biggest online ad exchanges, automated marketplaces that let advertisers buy space among thousands of websites to target key audience groups. Oath, the media and ad business run by Verizon, in September announced plans to combine its suites of advertising and publishing solutions under a single umbrella called Oath Ad Platforms. BrightRoll, One by AOL and Yahoo Gemini were brought into the new suite, with key services including DSP, a search marketplace and programmatic exchanges.