Verizon isn’t the only carrier that wants to ramp up in ad tech to complement (and offset) its legacy business. Today, Norway-based Telenor announced that it has acquired Tapad, a New York-based ad tech startup co-founded by two Norwegians, Are Traasdahl and Dag Liodden, for $360 million “on a debt and cash-free basis.” The price covers 95% of the company. Traasdahl and Liodden are together keeping the remaining 5%. The deal is expected to close Q1 2016, subject to regulatory conditions.
Tapad was founded in 2010 and focuses on cross-device marketing technology: it tracks what it says are billions of data points across multiple screens to gain a better sense of what consumers are doing online, and then packages and sells that information to media buyers, brands and other advertisers in order to create better targeted advertising, to feed into what Tapad estimates is a $160 billlion digital advertising market.
As mobile carriers face increasing pressure on their core, legacy offering of voice services, and basic data gets cheaper and cheaper for consumers and becomes a thinner margin business, these carriers are looking to add more services on top of the network, leveraging their own subscriber bases but potentially also providing services that work across other networks, too.
“With the acquisition of Tapad, Telenor Group is taking a position within the rapidly growing market for advertising technology, and securing important competence within digital marketing and analytics. I believe significant value can be created from applying marketing technology to improve the digital capabilities of our core telecom business. This will improve our understanding of customer behaviour, and supports building a platform for other business areas,’’ says Sigve Brekke, Chief Executive Officer of Telenor Group, in a statement.
This is Traasdahl’s second exit: previously he sold a music startup called Thumbplay to Clear Channel.
There has been a lot of heat over the ad tech industry and how it potentially compromises user privacy. And on top of that, the massive amount of targeting, pinging and cookies make the experience of using services very slow and data-heavy, which has led to the rise in popularity of ad blockers. For what it’s worth, Tapad says that its Device Graph respects data privacy, working with anonymized data.
It sounds like Telenor primarily intends to use the tech across its own footprint, which is not only in Norway, as its name might imply: the company is also very active in emerging markets like Vietnam and Burma, where mobile networks are only just starting to hit the big time with services that are not cost-crippling to the vast majority of residents.
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