Michael Scissons
The Toronto-born and now internationally run Syncapse, a social media management company, has acquired Clickable, an ad tech company.
The two systems will be integrated to layer Clickable’s social-ad buying technology onto Syncapse’s measurement and analytics-focused offering that’s been honed for earned media, according to Syncapse CEO Michael Scissons. He said that adding Clickable’s product to the mix will incorporate a paid-media element that will give Syncapse’s core marketer and digital-agency clients a richer data set with which to gauge how their social campaigns are performing.
“We see that promoting media becomes an important part of managing customer relationships, so we needed to extend our offering into those areas,” he said.
Syncapse declined to give the price it paid for Clickable, which had raised another $12 million last fall to bring its total funding to $32.5 million. AllThingsD is reporting that the deal was done mainly through equity, valuing Clickable at near the sum it’s raised.
Scissons noted that the recent sales of Buddy Media to Salesforce.com for $689 million and Vitrue to Oracle for $300 million have accelerated the pace of acquisition in the social-marketing space, and it gave Syncapse an extra push to build out its engineering and sales teams and its technology stack to stay competitive. Total headcount at Syncapse will be 220, up from 150 pre-acquisition.
“We have a vision of being the largest independent player in the space that isn’t attached to a legacy technology stack or a specific agency network,” Scissons said.
While 5-year-old Clickable had been designed around search and also allows advertiser and agency clients to monitor and manage their spend on Google and Bing, the company’s VP-marketing Max Kalehoff told Ad Age last fall that social would be its biggest area of acceleration over the coming year. Last year it rolled out a Facebook ad-building tool designed to enable big advertisers to launch thousands of ads concurrently in order to test and optimize them.
Syncapse clients include Coca-Cola, Anheuser-Busch, Diageo and JP Morgan, while some of Clickable’s major clients are agencies across the WPP and Interpublic Group of Cos. networks. Mr. Scissons said that Clickable will now be part of a Syncapse ad-management platform.
To read the original story in Advertising Age, click here.
