AcuityAds Holdings Inc. – Company Profile
Headquartered in Toronto and holding offices throughout the US, Latin America, and Europe, AcuityAds Holdings Inc. (TSX:AT) (OTCQX:ACUIF) is a leading programmatic marketing and decision science company that empowers businesses and marketers to make smarter decisions. It amplifies its customers’ reach across all ad formats and screens and attains the best share of attention throughout the customer journey.
AcuityAds’ services include video advertising, self-serve advertising technology, and mobile advertising. Through the company’s unique, data-driven insights, its real-time analytics, and its industry-leading activation platform—which is based on proprietary, Artificial Intelligence technology—Acuity offers trusted, unparalleled solutions that the most demanding marketers require to be successful in the digital era.
The company connects marketers and consumers through a four-step process. First, it captures shopping intent; second, it matches the consumer with the best advertiser; third, it delivers the ad; and fourth, it measures the value that was delivered.
AcuityAds utilizes bidding technology to optimize campaign performance in real-time. It also leverages an integrated ecosystem of partners for data, inventory, brand safety, and fraud prevention. This, coupled with its own proprietary technology that has built-in brand safety and fraud protection measures, provides the best possible service to track information, achieve the most authentic results, and protect a client’s brand.
Before, during, and after the campaign, Acuity’s protection includes always-on contextual scanning, which verifies that content matches IAB brand safety measures. The company’s campaigns minimize bot fraud, human click farm, and iFraming units, as well as provide traffic, content scoring, and IP filtering. Its protections are also fully integrated with comScore vCE and compatible with Nielsen OCR and Integral Ad Science.
Programmatic Marketing and Acuity’s True Reach Insights
Through programmatic advertising, AcuityAds provides advertisers a more intelligent way to connect with consumers. It lets clients know exactly how much attention they are getting online and what they can do to get more.
The company’s product suite is anchored by a proprietary consumer valuing tool, which assists marketers in valuing the cost of digital media and achieving goals with greater efficiency. It does this by using insights that offer a fingerprint-level-understanding of users in order to identify, assess, and improve buying decisions.
Acuity’s True Reach Insights platform is the only trusted digital video measurement technology in existence today. It provides a comprehensive view of organic and paid media with visibility across major digital platforms, including Facebook and YouTube. True Reach also charts video content consumption back to the IDs, allowing it to rank each North American consumer’s likelihood to engage with video messaging, no matter the category.
In addition, through True Reach, AcuityAds can offer marketers access to a rich data set of insights and data analytics about their video campaigns. True Reach is the most comprehensive multi-channel programmatic activation platform and offers deep domain experience in video, ad tech/programmatic media, and big data analytics for all digital marketing initiatives.
The Digital Ads Market and Acuity’s Aggressive Growth
eMarketer projects that, in 2019, advertisers in the US will spend nearly $60 billion on programmatic display. Globally, it will be close to $85 billion. By 2021, nearly 88% of all US digital display ad dollars will likely transact programmatically.
The programmatic advertising industry started only about 10 years ago. At the rate it’s growing, it’s likely to become the biggest sector in the $327 billion digital marketing space.
Global marketing as a whole is worth approximately $700 billion. TV advertising represents the largest share of that marketing spend. Due to the fact that fewer people are watching cable and more are watching connected TV, the addressable market has never been bigger or easier to access for digital marketing agencies.
Through its acquisition of Visible Measures in 2017, AcuityAds has gained access to a massive proprietary dataset. It also has a patented programmatic technology that combines five trillion data points to reach more than 500 million unique monthly users across 600,000 web and mobile properties.
In addition, since its founding, AcuityAds has grown its revenue at a compound annual growth rate of 79%. In the last twelve months, the company’s revenue exceeded $100 million for the first time. For Q2 2019, Acuity posted a gross profit of $25.8 million, which shows 95% year-over-year growth, and an adjusted EBITDA of $1.1 million, showing 175% year-over-year growth. This means the time has never been better to invest in this game-changing company.
Meet the AcuityAds Holdings Team
Tal Hayek, Co-Founder & CEO – In 2004, Tal Hayek founded Incentaclick, a marketing platform that focused on lead generation and customer acquisition. Within two years, it was sold to a public company. Hayek stayed on for another two years and helped that company’s revenue grow to $110 million by 2008. During this time, he began to notice major inefficiencies in media buying, and in 2009, Hayek shifted this value focus to digital advertising. Just like that, Acuity was born.
Dr. Nathan Mekuz, Co-Founder & CTO – Dr. Mekuz is the heart of AcuityAds’ industry-leading technology. For more than twenty years, he has been researching machine learning algorithms for statistical pattern recognition and predictive analytics. His work has been published in numerous professional publications, textbooks, and patents. Mekuz previously worked for IBM.
Rachel Kapcan, Co-Founder & CIO – Rachel Kapcan began her career in the world-renowned unit 8200 of the Israeli intelligence corps. While there, she developed and designed contextual information and research systems. She also led projects developing a full-text retrieval system, including morphological and soundex searches. More recently, Kapcan managed multi-million dollar infrastructure projects in the financial services industry.
Joe Ontman, Co-Founder & CRO – In 1998, Joe Ontman founded OTA, a computer-supply company that focused on large enterprises. Defying the odds in an exceptionally competitive environment, Ontman landed major clients like Mount Sinai Hospital, the University of Toronto, the Government of Ontario, and others. He founded a successful affiliate marketing company in 2007. Now, Ontman brings to AcuityAds more than 10 years of experience in the ad-tech industry.
Jonathan Pollack, CFO – Jonathan Pollack previously served as the CFO and corporate secretary of Kaboose Inc and was the EVP of API Technologies Corp. He is a director of several public and private companies, including CECO Environmental Corp. and Aeterna Zentaris Inc. Pollack has also worked in investment banking in New York.
Seraj Bharwani, CSO – Seraj Bharwani is responsible for consumer insights on cross-screen, digital, and social media. Before coming to AcuityAds, he led strategy and analytics practice at Digitas for more than 14 years. He joined the agency as part of the founding team that led it through its early growth phase, its IPO, and its exit through an acquisition by Publicis.