Operating as Adcentricity, the new company wants to be the Switzerland of digital out of home.
Toronto-based mobile shopping platform Bee Media is abuzz over its acquisition of digital out-of-home advertising company Adcentricity. Financial terms of the deal, announced Tuesday, were not disclosed.
The newly created entity will operate under the name Adcentricity, with Bee Media CEO Doug Woolridge retaining his current role. Adcentricity CEO Rob Gorrie will remain with the company as a senior strategic advisor.
Brad Alles, senior vice-president of business development for Adcentricity in Toronto, said the deal brings together two complementary businesses in the fast-growing location-based marketing industry.
While the two companies had been working together for the past six months, Alles said it made sense for them to formalize their relationship.
“We were building a very unique and robust mobile shopping platform, Adcentricity had a network of location based digital signage, and we just thought it was a great marriage when you’ve got people walking around with mobile phones all day long,” said Alles. “We just saw an opportunity to reach consumers on every digital channel.”
Launched in 2010, Bee Media has created a white-label mobile shopping solution that its customers—a diverse group including retailers, loyalty programs and telcos—can use to deliver what chief marketing officer David Peres described as an “enhanced shopping experience” for consumers.
The company’s ultimate objective, Alles added, is the ability to push messages from a digital screen to a consumer’s mobile device. “The ability to have consistent messaging on both screens and the ability to make the offer live a little bit longer as people take it away with them on their mobile phone is the Holy Grail,” he said.
Adcentricity currently operates more than 250,000 digital out-of-home faces in 16 venue types throughout North America. It will continue to offer its ADCentral product, a centralized hub where media planners and buyers can choose from more than one billion impressions across the digital sphere, including digital out-of-home, in-store signage and in-store radio, among other venues.
The company is also inviting other networks to “plug into” the central hub, said Alles. “We want to be Switzerland and invite other networks to plug into our ADCentral hub. They can sell their own inventory or we could sell it for them or we could both sell it.”
