With Facebook poised to buy display ad platform Atlas, can the social network rival Google’s Doubleclick? Julie Langley, MD of Results International looks at the implications of the deal on the sector and thoughts on future acquisitions.
If Facebook’s acquisition of Atlas goes ahead, it will be a game-changer for Facebook and a serious challenge to Google in the advertising space.
Facebook has always faced difficulties in demonstrating to advertisers the value of its advertising. Clearly it sits on huge amounts of valuable data for advertisers and will figure out a way to use that data. Acquiring Atlas would give Facebook market-leading campaign management, tracking and attribution tools to help advertisers measure the effectiveness of their ads (which Google already has through DoubleClick).
Combining Atlas’ advertiser facing ad serving, tracking tools and cookies database with Facebook’s data is potentially a very powerful combination for advertisers and enables Facebook to compete much more powerfully with Google in the display ad space.
It’s likely that this deal would trigger more consolidation in the “ad stack” space. There will be clear winners and losers as there are a lot of commoditised offerings in the ad network and ad exchange sector who are going to struggle to find an exit. Differentiated offerings that add value to the media buying, optimising and tracking process, such as Real Time Bidding, location based targeting or video propositions, will be acquisition targets.
Other consolidators could include Adobe, AppNexus, Yahoo, or Opera Software in the mobile space. The enterprise software vendors such as IBM, Salesforce and Oracle are also possible candidates but I suspect they may stay more focussed on enterprise level software offerings.
By Julie Langley
Managing Director
Results International
