MediaMath

History

MediaMath was founded in 2007. The company was initially a bid manager through which agency holding companies and media buyers could access advertising exchanges to purchase leftover ad space available on online publications' web sites. The company also developed financial instruments for use in the exchange market as it was first developing. Stephanie Clifford wrote of the company that, “With some Wall Street-like analysis, advertisers can find individual Web surfers, figure out how much to pay to show them an ad and analyze how those ads have performed. Firms like [MediaMath] are working on analyzing which of those users might be attractive, then tracking how advertisements served to them perform.”

In August 2009, MediaMath raised $12.5 million in venture capital funding, from sources including Safeguard Scientifics, QED Investors, and the Silicon Valley Bank. The funding was used in part to expand MediaMath’s own online exchange buying platform. The platform, TerminalOne, included a user interface and data management layer that combined third-party data with information provided by the buyer. Algorithms and bid optimization processes were used to refine purchasing decisions for the buyer, through the industry’s first demand-side media trading platform. The platform initially served several billion targeted ads per month. In June 2014 MediaMath received $175 million in additional funding, with $73.5 coming from Spring Lake Equity Partners and the remainder from the Silicon Valley Bank.

In 2011 the firm released Private MarketPlaces, which allowed the use of TerminalOne across all inventory sources in the advertising exchange market. That year the firm was involved in about twenty billion impressions per day, with six billion per day coming in the Asian-Pacific region. The company runs data centers in North Bergen, New Jersey, Chicago, Palo Alto, Zurich, Paris, Hong Kong, and opened an additional offices in Tokyo and Singapore in 2014. In 2013 the firm created the OPEN portal, which connects buyers to partner services and technologies. The firm launched Adroit Digital in June 2013. In May 2014 the firm created an app that allowed the input of social media data into its algorithms, specifically from Twitter. The firm’s monthly offering of video impressions in 2014 was 60 billion.

Company overview

The CEO of MediaMath is co-founder Joe Zawadzki. 2012 revenues were approximately $135 million, and their customer base including 55 of the Fortune 100 companies. In 2013 MediaMath acquired a portion of the Boston-area data-management company Akamai Technologies. The company used Akamai’s staff and locations to expand its engineering and R&D departments into Cambridge, MA, placing about a quarter of its employees in Cambridge as of late 2013. That year the firm’s client base included about half of the Fortune 500 and approximately one thousand brands. As of April 2014 the company had 375 employees. In 2014 the firm also acquired Tactads, a French company that specializes in cross-device mobile ad targeting.

The New Marketing Institute

The New Marketing Institute is the educational wing of MediaMath. It was founded in 2012 in partnership with the Direct Marketing Association. The institute provides courses in ad technology education, specifically for digital media buyers and those involved with advertising exchanges.