AdYouLike has been pushing pretty hard to become a leader in the native advertising space. After raising money last year, the company acquired UK Startup Content Amp for $2.5 Million this past April, marking their intention to expand outside of their native France. Now, AdYouLike has confirmed their acquisition of the UK Video Natives, a startup on pace for $2 Million in turnover in 2014.
As we spoke earlier this week, the Advertising space is ripe for some large consolidation – whether it be in Video Ads, Mobile Ads, Native Ads, or elsewhere – the question that everyone, including Wall Street, is asking themselves, is who will thrive, who will survive, and who will slip between the cracks?
AdYouLike CEO Julien Verdier doesn’t look like he plans to wait and see how the cards fall. I sat down with Verdier to talk about AdYouLike’s ambitious plans:
Why so many acquisitions? Is this part of the greater consolidation movement going on in Adtech?
It is our 2nd acquisition, and both in the UK. UK is now the very 1st market for Adyoulike and I’m now living in the UK. Adyoulike raised 1.4M€ and was always profitable from day 1, so we had cash in the bank and we wanted to move fast in the UK. With Content Amp we added the Content Marketing asset to our offer, and with Video Natives now we add the Programmatic asset, which is one of our big topic at Adyoulike for the last 6 months.
Where are you going in the next 18 months? New Markets? New technologies?
We are on our way to open Germany by the end of 2014 early 2015, we will announce soon a partnership in the Middle East (Dubai). As Native is a global opportunity, we want to turn global asap.
It’s plain to see that the big technology platforms are really late in adopting Native Advertising, so we decided to build our own SSP dedicated to Native Ads, which will open a whole new world to our publishers.
Who do you see AdYouLike as? A 21st century Publicis?
Adyoulike has a technological & scalable vision of the content creation and distribution, when others like Publicis have still an advisory vision mostly I think.
My personal vision is that now the gold rush is definitely Native Advertising, and we are selling shovels 🙂