Ad tech company Sizmek has confirmed it will dissolve the Rocket Fuel brand, months after acquiring the predictive marketing platform in a deal worth approximately $145 million.
The move solidifies the merge of the two brands under the Sizmek identity and provides the first step towards them offering increased transparency, with company claiming it will disclose all media buying fees.
This follows a checkered past for the acquired company Rocket Fuel, which faced allegations of bot fraud from placing ads on deceptive websites for Mercedes-Benz. In addition, the company stopped serving ad buys to news site Breitbart amid concerns over offensive language and hate speech.
The acquisition of Rocket Fuel, which took place in July, almost fell through, with legal firm Levin & Korsinsky investigating the proposed deal to determine whether or not it was in the interest of existing shareholders. The deal was subsequently approved and completed in September.
United front
With more than 20,000 advertisers and 3,600 agencies across 70 countries around the world, Sizmek is a global independent buy-side advertising platform, managing advertisers’ creative, programmatic and data.
The company now aims to drive forward Artificial Intelligence (AI) to identify key insight across five dimensions of predictive marketing: campaigns, consumers, context, creative and costs to gather as much robust data as possible.
For media agencies and advertisers, this means using the global platform provides them with all the information they need in one place in order to better understand relationships within the media supply chain and drive more value to their campaigns.
“Through our combined capabilities in data enablement, creative optimisation and media execution, we’re in a stronger position than ever to meet and exceed the industry’s expectations while giving our clients the transparency they deserve,” said Eric Duerr, chief marketing officer of Sizmek.
At the time of acquiring Rocket Fuel in July, Mark Grether, chair executive officer of Sizmek said the move is the “next logical step” in improving customer experience through automation, bringing more context and creativity to the platform.