Marketing tech and ad tech, married to each other but often living separate lives, are coming together in a new merger announced today.
New York City-based ad tech firm Magnetic is combining with San Mateo, California-based marketing and personalization provider MyBuys. The new company, which claims about $100 million in annual revenue and 700 customers worldwide, is also announcing $25 million in new investment funding.
"Your typical marketing tech company," Magnetic CEO James Green told me via email, "is focused on customers and what happens after someone becomes a customer, rather than prospects or people who have yet to convert."
Marketing tech falls down in finding and reaching new customers, he said, adding that ad tech excels at "finding new customers and [isn't] typically connected to things like CRM [customer relationship management] databases."
Of course, this is a simplification to make a point that the efforts to find prospects, turn them into customers, keep existing customers happy, and bring back inactive customers need to be unified.
More commonly, demand generation is considered marketing's forte, whether that means generating demand from prospects, leads, customers, or lapsed customers. Ad tech is one of the tools.
Magnetic uses search queries, website visits, and the like as purchase intent signals to find prospects. A user might research a new car on a dealership website, for instance, which is added to his anonymous profile. A brand might then serve an ad via Magnetic for discounted dealer financing to that potential customer.
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MyBuys provides personalized offers to existing and prospective customers through such means as digital ads, email, and website product recommendations, based on online and offline shopping behaviors. Users who leave a site without buying can see ads or emails offering discounts to lure them back, with particular emphasis on past customers who haven't made a purchase in a while.
By combining, the company expects to deliver an enlarged customer profiling and targeting platform that stretches from intent, through online and offline shopping behavior, and across online and physical store channels. The idea is to cover lead prospecting, customer nurturing, and customer reactivation through one company.
Without MyBuys, Green told me, Magnetic "can offer marketers the opportunity to reach people who are in the market for their product." With MyBuys, it can also segment out existing customers and, for instance, pitch car insurance to an existing home insurance customer when she is shopping for a new car.
Large marketing cloud companies like Adobe or Salesforce, he noted, are increasingly adding ad tech. In the personalization/retargeting space, Green mentioned Criteo, Twitter's TellApart, and Certona as competitors, but said they are point solutions while the new Magnetic wants to offer a more comprehensive solution across channels and devices.
The new funding will be used throughout the company, in product development, engineering, sales and marketing, and customer development. The round was led by Edison Partners with participation by Charles River Ventures, ORIX Ventures, the Honeywell pension, Jonathan Kraft, Roger Ehrenberg, and others.
Previously, Magnetic had raised $15.5 million and MyBuys $49.2 million.
Retaining the Magnetic brand, the newly enlarged company is headquartered in New York City. Green remains the CEO, while MyBuys CEO Rita Brogley joins the board.