Smart Device Media Co-Founder and Former Ziff Davis CEO Jason Young to lead the Combined Company
NEW YORK – Two leading mobile advertising organizations, Crisp Media and Smart Device Media today announced that they have combined to create a full-service mobile advertising powerhouse. The combined company will continue doing business under the name – Crisp Media. Jason Young, Smart Device Media co-founder and former Ziff Davis CEO, will assume the role of CEO of Crisp Media.
This combination brings together Crisp’s market leading, rich media advertising platform with Smart Device Media’s unparalleled media marketplace of targeted, brand safe, premium inventory. As a combined business, Crisp Media will offer brands, agencies, and publishers a unique set of product solutions to enable high quality brand advertising to successfully extend to mobile and other emerging device platforms.
With the mobile ad market in the US expected to grow to over $4 Billion by 2013 according to Forrester Research, the activity level of larger brand marketers is ramping quickly. “We are seeing the inflection point of major brand marketers starting to embrace mobile platforms as an important part of their marketing mix,” said Tim Bajarin, President of Creative Strategies, a leading technology and mobile research firm.
Crisp Media expects to offer significant and unrivaled benefits to publishers and advertisers, including:
– Crisp’s industry leading HTML5 based rich media platform and Crisp Engage, the self service mobile ad management framework, which together enable the building, serving, and measurement of high impact rich media advertising on mobile and other emerging device types using open, industry ad formats (ORMMA, MRAID).
– The combined scale of the Smart Device Media and Crisp Select media marketplaces, matching premium brand advertisers with premium mobile inventory.
– An experienced services organization capable of executing award winning creative campaigns globally.
“As our clients look to extend their advertising activities into mobile environments we need partners that can offer turnkey solutions delivering best of breed capabilities in ad formats, ad targeting, and ad measurement,” said Michael Collins, CEO of Joule, a mobile marketing agency that is part of the WPP Group. Crisp Media will be uniquely positioned to offer open, scalable, and efficient solutions to meet these needs.
Crisp Media will provide publishers with a comprehensive solution set to help them create compelling advertising experiences that will provide high levels of reader engagement and maximum yield for their inventory. “As our audiences interact more frequently with our content brands via mobile based platforms, we are focused on creating the very best advertising solutions for our marketing partners,” said Cameron Clayton, EVP Digital, The Weather Channel.
“The mobile ad market is at the critical stage where premium brands are starting to play significantly,” said newly appointed Crisp Media CEO Young. “Yet because barriers to buy still exist, the premium market demands an integrated set of solutions optimized for its unique needs. Crisp Media will be a catalyst for the industry, by bringing together an unrivaled combination of platform, products, services, and team expertise.”
Boris Fridman, the outgoing CEO of Crisp Media, will continue to serve as a board member. “The combination of these two perfectly complementary businesses fulfills the vision Crisp Media has been working toward. The new Crisp Media will be an even stronger partner for the brands, publishers, and agencies we serve today,” added Fridman.
About Crisp Media
Crisp Media is a pioneer of mobile ad products that make HTML5 advertising scalable across device platforms for native apps and browsers. Crisp Engage, an interactive ad platform designed to deliver the slickest ads to multiple screens, enables agencies to easily build, manage and measure rich media advertising campaigns on connected devices. Crisp is also a founding member of the Open Rich Media for Mobile Advertising (ORMMA) standard API, an Open Source project for letting agencies deliver HTML ads to native applications. Leading brands — including GM, Ford, Toyota, VW, IBM, Intel, HP, Procter and Gamble, Unilever, Coca-Cola, HBO and Paramount Pictures — have run Crisp ads. For more information visit www.crispmedia.com
About Smart Device Media
Smart Device Media is a leading provider of mobile, premium display, special interest advertising channels. Smart Device Media offers brand marketers the ability to reach premium, targeted audiences at scale within high-quality editorial environments, and publishers an unparalleled ability to monetize their premium ad inventory with transparency.
Company web site: www.smartdevicemedia.com
