Azerion Makes Significant Progress With The Consolidation And Integration Of Previous Acquisitions

Azerion has shared further details on the progress made in consolidating and integrating previously acquired businesses, which led to the launch of new products, market expansions, technological improvements and expected cost savings.

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Azerion’s initiatives to integrate and consolidate the different technologies, teams, brands, offices and back-office activities have progressed well in Q1 2023 and are expected to result in annualized savings of at least EUR 15 million compared to January 2023 baseline. This is a significant improvement to the previously communicated expectation of at least EUR 10 million annualized savings.

After its listing on Euronext Amsterdam in early 2022, Azerion completed several acquisitions, most of them during the second half of last year. Since the beginning of 2023, Azerion has set out as one of its priorities to accelerate the integration of past acquisitions and make Azerion’s platform more efficient and fit to scale up later in 2023. Below some examples of successful integration initiatives:

Ad sales

Over the last few years Azerion has built direct sales capabilities and expertise across various markets, working closely with advertisers and media agencies to maximise their results.

• Infinia (audience targeting technology with local direct sales presence in the Iberia and LATAM regions – acquired in March 2022) was rebranded into Azerion and completed the integration of teams, offices and back-office. Furthermore, Infinia’s technical capabilities to create and target audiences to better reach exact audiences has been integrated and shared with other regions and Azerion offices.
• Hybrid Theory (audience targeting technology with local direct sales presence in the UK, US and APAC regions – acquired in November 2022) has rebranded into Azerion and also merged all its teams into the Azerion teams for the relevant markets. As with Infinia, their technology and knowledge are now used group wide to offer our clients expertise and execution in brand performance marketing.
• Mmedia (local direct sales presence in the Netherlands – acquired in October 2022) has been further integrated in the Dutch operation, merging sales, publisher and monetization expertise into the Dutch operation.

Overall, the sales teams in the UK, Germany, France, Nordics, US, Italy and Benelux regions have further integrated offerings and products and are increasingly selling easy-to-use, brand-safe and competitively priced solutions to advertisers and media agencies, so that they can reach affordable audiences at scale everywhere and receive better outcomes.

Adtech

Azerion continuously invests in launching creative ad formats and optimising its advertising technology. The focus has been on innovating with unique proprietary ad formats as well as using technology to reduce complexity for advertisers and publishers.

• TargetSpot (audio ad format technology – acquired in November 2022) has enabled its audio supply technology into Azerion’s wider SSP platform. Product development has been centralized in Amsterdam, while teams in the US and Belgium have been integrated into the relevant Azerion teams. Offices and back-office activities have been merged and centralized.
• Vlyby (video ad format technology – acquired in October 2022) has integrated into Azerion’s German operations. It also further integrated with previously acquired company Zoomin (video development) to offer smart content propositions to advertisers and publishers. This new video product is currently under expansion.
• Madvertise (mobile advertising technology – acquired in July 2022) has been integrated into Azerion’s French and German operations, including teams and back-office.

Curated content

One of the key elements of Azerion value proposition is to offer unique reach to advertisers. In order to bring audiences together at scale, Azerion develops its own digital content and partners with thousands of digital publishers. Over the last few years Azerion has built publisher monetization capabilities and expertise, working closely with publishers to maximise their results.

• AdPlay (publisher monetization services – acquired in November 2022) has integrated into Azerion’s operations in Italy and has been chosen as Azerion’s publisher monetization services offerings for the Italian market.
• Takerate (publisher monetization services – acquired in October 2022) has merged into Adplay, generating the efficiencies relating to sales teams, operations, analytics, development and back- office.

Overall, Azerion is further consolidating its publisher monetization services into a single stack. The first step was to consolidate the offerings per region (Italy: Adplay; France: Adverline; US and Nordics: Pubgalaxy; DACH, Benelux and UK: Mmedia; Nordics: Keymobile). Full global integration is expected to be initiated later in 2023.

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Next steps

The integration efforts are expected to continue through Q2 and Q3 2023 to make Azerion’s platform more efficient and ready to further scale up. These efforts will include the roll-out of the acquired products and services across all Azerion regions to ensure one single set of offering to advertisers and publishers, as well as rebranding of products and entities and legal mergers and acquired subsidiaries. More updates will be provided over the course of 2023.

About Azerion

Azerion is a high-growth digital entertainment and media platform. We bring globally scaled audiences to advertisers in an easy and affordable way through our technology and in a safe, engaging and high quality environment, thanks to our owned and operated content with entertainment and other publishing partners.

Having its roots in Europe with its headquarters in Amsterdam, Azerion believes in a personal and local approach and has teams based in over 26 cities around the world to closely support our clients and partners to find and execute creative ways to really make an impact through advertising.

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