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On Monday, the programmatic media buying agency MiQ acquired the compliance platform Grasp, the latest in a series of acquisitions in the last year.
Grasp will remain a standalone business, Paul Silver, MiQ’s global president of corporate development, told Marketing Brew. He declined to share how much MiQ paid to acquire Grasp.
Grasp offers quality-assurance tools that work inside major digital ad-buying platforms like Google and Meta to flag campaign issues and help marketers ensure their campaigns are set up properly. The tools are designed in part to reduce campaign overspend.
The platform puts digital guardrails and checklists in place for media buyers when they’re logged into buying platforms, and can also send real-time alerts through Slack and Microsoft Teams to flag noncompliance or campaign issues. Grasp claims on its website that for every $1 million campaign, $45,000 is overspent.
The usefulness of a tool that helps “prevent human errors in media buying workflows” has grown in importance, especially as agencies have hired more remote workers, Silver told Marketing Brew. “It’s very hard to train teams the way we might have trained them 10 years ago, [since] not everyone is in the office every day learning on the job,” he said. Modern compliance and safeguarding tools like Grasp, he said, can, “for newer members coming into the industry, help minimize the rate of mistakes.”
“Workflow and [operations] stuff tends to be really unsexy, but it’s the stuff that’s actually the hardest thing to solve and it’s the most valuable and impactful day to day,” he said.
Grasp’s clients have included L’Oréal and PepsiCo, along with agencies like Havas Media Group, Dentsu, and Publicis. MiQ, which helps agencies buy programmatic advertising, already works with many of the major holding companies, like WPP, IPG, and Dentsu, Silver said.
Since announcing a partnership with the private-equity group Bridgepoint in September 2022, MiQ has made several other major acquisitions . Last year, the company acquired the audience platform AirGrid, and earlier this year it took over Samba TV’s media sales business.
“We want to be the single largest programmatic media business on the planet,” Silver said.
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