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Sensor Tower makes its first acquisition with deal for market intelligence company, Pathmatics
Mobile app market intelligence firm Sensor Tower has made its first acquisition. The company this morning announced it’s acquiring Pathmatics, a market intelligence company which will now combine its paid digital and social media platform with Sensor Tower’s business. Deal terms were not detailed but include an undisclosed growth investment from Riverwood Capital into Pathmatics.
The acquisition will allow the companies to offer an expanded set of digital and mobile advertising insights to their respective customers, including new social insights for TikTok, YouTube mobile and Snap this year, powered by Sensor Tower.
The companies also will introduce digital TV (over-the-top) insights, expanded coverage for mobile apps and ad insights, and will extend Pathmatics’ social and digital coverage globally.
The deal follows Sensor Tower’s first significant fundraising last year, with $45 million also from Riverwood Capital. Though Sensor Tower had been profitable since its launch, now serving more than 350 enterprise-level customers for its app and ad intelligence products, it chose to raise the additional capital in order to further grow its business, with investments in hiring, marketing, infrastructure and other expansions.
With Pathmatics, it’s buying a company that’s also been on its way up. The company had seen over 100% year-over-year growth for its own market intelligence business since launching in 2011. It now has over 250 brands, media and advertising agencies as customers, as well as over 7,000 users of its platform, representing over 200% software-as-a-service growth since 2018.
The two businesses are teaming up at a time when digital advertising is also on the rise, in part due to the shifts in the market attributed to the pandemic. As more businesses began operating online last year, advertisers increased their digital ad spending by 12.7% to $368 billion, per eMarketer. And digital advertising will account for 58% of media spending in 2021.
We understand Sensor Tower acquired both the IP and its more than 60-person team from Pathmatics as a result of the acquisition. The entire team will join Sensor Tower, with the executive suite now being a combination of both companies’ leaders. Sensor Tower co-founder Alexey Malafeev will remain as CEO while Gabe Gottlieb, CEO and co-founder of Pathmatics, will become chief strategy officer.
Historically, Pathmatics had provided brands and agencies with all creative used by advertisers, spend and impression, and path to publisher and viewer, to help them reduce waste from their budgets, improve their own marketing and predict their competitors’ next move.
Going forward, both sets of customers will be able to opt into the other company’s solutions, including mobile, social media and digital insights. Longer-term, the two companies will work together to bring more products to the market for their over 600 combined customers across 50 countries. Among these is a plan to add Pathmatics’ Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and other digital ad intelligence capture into Sensor Tower, as well as an effort to augment Sensor Tower’s data set with ad insights beyond app installs.
These features will make the product a better fit for larger brands looking into all aspects of the competitors’ campaigns, ranging from how they’re advertising for app installs to how they’re building brand awareness.
The deal officially closed on May 17, 2021, Sensor Tower says.
Santa Monica-based Pathmatics had raised $7.7 million to date from Upfront Ventures, BDMI and Baroda Ventures.
“As the global economy increasingly shifts to digital, it’s imperative that companies can understand and
navigate the entire digital landscape — from mobile to web and desktop — using accurate and insightful data,” noted Ramesh Venugopal, principal at Riverwood Capital, in a statement about the acquisition. “The combination of Sensor Tower and Pathmatics presents a unique and valuable offering to customers allowing them to take advantage of a broad range of datasets with increased focus on consumer privacy and deep digital insights that leaders in every industry will need,” he added.
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Boost ROI with intent data and personalized multichannel marketing campaigns
Coronavirus is causing large and small businesses to drastically cut marketing budgets. In Forrester’s self-described “most optimistic scenario,” the analysts project a 28% drop in U.S. marketing spend by the end of 2021. Even Google is cutting its marketing budget in half. As marketers move forward, Forrester predicts marketing automation platforms will grow despite an overall decline in marketing technology investment.
Automation platforms help marketers scale their communications. However, scaling communications is not a substitute for intimacy, which all humans crave. Because of the pandemic, it is harder than ever to get attention, let alone make a connection. More mass email blasts from your marketing automation platform are not going to get you the connections with prospects you crave. So how should marketers proceed? Direct mail captures 100% of your audience’s attention. It provides a sensory experience for your prospects and customers, and that helps establish an emotional connection.
Winning marketers are strategically merging automation and digital data with the more intimate channel of direct mail. We call this tactile marketing automation (TMA).
TMA is the integration of direct mail or personalized swag with a marketing automation platform. With TMA, a marketer doesn’t have to think about creating direct mail campaigns outside of digital campaigns. Rather, direct mail experiences are already fully integrated into the pre-built customer journey.
TMA uses intent data to inform content, messaging and the timing of direct mail touchpoints that maximize relevancy and scalability. Multichannel campaigns including direct mail report an ROI 18 percentage points higher than those without direct mail. Plus, 84% of marketers state direct mail improves multichannel campaign performance.
Read on to see how you can merge digital communications and direct mail to deliver remarkable experiences that spark a connection.
Incorporate intent data
Personalization is a key ingredient of a remarkable experience. Many marketers automate processes by introducing marketing software and then call it personalization. But, oftentimes it’s just quicker batching and blasting. Brands can’t just change the first name on a piece of content and call it “personalized.” Real personalization is necessary and vital for real results. Our consumers expect more. The best way to introduce real personalization within a marketing mix is to use intent data and trigger-driven campaigns.
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Email creation startup Stensul raises $16M
Stensul, a startup aiming to streamline the process of building marketing emails, has raised $16 million in Series B funding.
When the company raised its $7 million Series A two years ago, founder and CEO Noah Dinkin told me about how it spun out of his previous startup, FanBridge. And while there are many products focused on email delivery, he said Stensul is focused on the email creation process.
Dinkin made many similar points when we discussed the Series B last week. He said that for many teams, creating a marketing email can take weeks. With Stensul, that process can be reduced to just two hours, with marketers able to create the email on their own, without asking developers for help. Things like brand guidelines are already built in, and it’s easy to get feedback and approval from executives and other teams.
Dinkin also noted that while the big marketing clouds all include “some kind of email builder, it’s not their center of gravity.”
He added, “What we tell folks [is that] literally over half the company is engineers, and they are only working on email creation.”
Image Credits: Stensul
The team has recently grown to more than 100 employees, with new customers like Capital One, ASICS Digital, Greenhouse, Samsung, AppDynamics, Kroger and Clover Health. New features include an integration with work management platform Workfront.
Plus, with other marketing channels paused or diminished during the pandemic, Dinkin said that email has only become more important, with the old, time-intensive process becoming more and more of a burden.
“We need more emails — whether that’s more versions or more segments or more languages, the requests are through the roof,” he said. “The teams are the same size … and so that’s where especially the leaders of these organizations have looked inward a lot more. The ways that they have been doing it for years or decades just doesn’t work anymore and prevents them from being competitive in the marketplace.”
The new round was led by USVP, with participation from Capital One Ventures, Peak State Ventures, plus existing investors Javelin Venture Partners, Uncork Capital, First Round Capital and Lowercase Capital . Individual investors include Okta co-founder and COO Frederic Kerrest, Okta CMO Ryan Carlson, former Marketo/Adobe executive Aaron Bird, Avid Larizadeh Duggan, Gary Swart and Talend CMO Lauren Vaccarello.
Dinkin said the money will allow Stensul to expand its marketing, product, engineering and sales teams.
“We originally thought: Everybody who sends email should have an email creation platform,” he said. “And ‘everyone who sends email’ is synonymous with ‘every company in the world.’ We’ve just seen that accelerate in that last few years.”
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2 strategies for creating top-of-funnel marketing content
Amanda Milligan is the marketing director at Fractl, a prominent growth marketing agency that’s helped Fortune 500 companies and boutique businesses alike earn quality media coverage, backlinks, awareness and authority.
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Even when you’re excellent at making the sale, you still need people to know you exist in the first place.
Content is excellent at making the case for your product or service, but it also excels at providing value to potential customers in a more tangential way, introducing them to your brand and building awareness and authority.
Here’s how utilizing content marketing and digital PR can make huge strides in getting your brand name out there.
Ranking on-site content for awareness keywords
When on-site content you created ranks well in the search engine results pages (SERPs), that doesn’t just mean you get more traffic (although that’s certainly a major benefit).
You’re also getting your brand name in front of searchers because you’re appearing in the results. You’re building authority because Google appears to believe you have the best answer for their query. You’re giving the searcher and answer to their question and beginning to build trust.
So how do you know which keywords/topics to target and what kind of content to create? You perform keyword research, which basically means examining what keywords people are searching for, how many people search for them per month and how hard it’ll be to rank for them.
Google Ads Keyword Planner provides this information, but you can also use Chrome plugins like Keywords Everywhere and Keyword Surfer or free tools like Ubersuggest.
Image Credits: Ubersuggest (opens in a new window)
When your goal is to build awareness, it’s important that the keywords and topics you target have high volume. In other words, they’re searched a lot. Awareness objectives mean reaching as many people as possible so more people know that your brand exists and begin to understand what it’s about.
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PopSugar co-founder says pandemic will create ‘a huge windfall’ for digital media
It’s been less than a year since Group Nine Media acquired PopSugar — but it’s been a uniquely challenging time in digital media.
Brian Sugar founded the eponymous women’s lifestyle site with his wife Lisa Sugar . Post-acquisition, he’s become president for the entirety of Group Nine (which also owns Thrillist, NowThis, The Dodo and Seeker) and also joined the company’s board.
That job probably looks very different from what he expected last fall. The company had to lay off 7% of its staff back in April, which Sugar described as “one of the worst days of my career.” At the same time, he remains confident about the online advertising business. In his view, it’s TV advertising that’s taken a “huge punch” in the face and will never recover.
“We like to think of ourselves as one of the fastest, most innovative publishers out there,” Sugar told me. “And now’s the time for us to kind of show that off.”
You can read an edited, updated and condensed transcript of our conversation below, in which I talked to Sugar about how his role has evolved, how he motivates the team during difficult times and what gets lost in the shift to remote work.
TechCrunch: Obviously, it’s been a crazy couple of months since we last talked. What does your job look like now?
Brian Sugar: Well, I feel like a data miner, searching for answers. I feel like a hackathon engineer. And I feel like a therapist. You know, we like to think of ourselves as one of the fastest, most innovative publishers out there. And now’s the time for us to kind of show that off.
[We’ve just been] looking at data on how people are consuming our content across platforms. And on our site, we’ve come up with some really interesting ideas that we’ve implemented. We’ve been having these really cool hackathon Fridays to build stuff quickly, because a lot of people feel like they have a little bit more time on their hands — because you don’t have to travel to meetings, you can get more work done. Some people feel they’re more efficient.
We’re extremely optimistic. All our brands are extremely optimistic, and so is [the whole] company.
You mentioned launching some new products to respond to how audience behavior is changing. Are there any examples?
The first one [is] the PopSugar Fitness thing. We were planning on launching a paid workout subscription service in May, but everybody was working from home [in March], and we decided to pull the launch all the way up to as fast as we can launch it. We launched it that following weekend. Since the launch in late March, over the past few months, we’ve had 200,000 people sign up, and we have 50,000 monthly active users on it.
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Accessing social groups through referrals
Julian Shapiro is the founder of BellCurve.com, a growth marketing team that trains startups in advanced growth, helps hire senior growth marketers and finds vetted growth agencies. He also writes at Julian.com.
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We’ve aggregated many of the world’s best growth marketers into one community. Twice a month, we ask them to share their most effective growth tactics, and we compile them into this Growth Report.
This is how you stay up-to-date on growth marketing tactics — with advice that’s hard to find elsewhere.
Our community consists of startup founders and heads of growth. You can participate by joining Demand Curve’s marketing training program or its Slack group.
Without further ado, on to our community’s advice.
Accessing social groups through referrals
Excerpt from Demand Curve’s Growth Training.
A surprising benefit of referrals is how they often lead to social partnership opportunities.
Consider this process:
- Find your happiest users.
- Figure out what social groups they belong to. This could be anything from a female founders group, to university alumni networks, to a restaurant management trade association.
- How do you find out? Just ask them what groups they belong to. Don’t be afraid of conversation.
- Ask the happy user to connect you with the heads of those groups. Solve a problem they collectively have — even if it’s only tangentially related to your business. What matters is that more of these ideal customers know and trust you. You can also refer speakers, offer deals, write content for them or offer free office hours.
- Down the road, these people inevitably send you referrals.
- Reach out cold to people in other, similar groups. Reference the endorsement of the original group and provide a case study (with their permission).
Going through groups can be a high-leverage way to land and expand into ideal audiences.
Pixel-sharing tactics
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Three growth marketing experts share their best tools and strategies for 2020
At last month’s Early Stage virtual event, channel growth experts joined TechCrunch reporters and editors for a series of conversations covering the best tools and strategies for building startups in 2020. For this post, I’ve recapped highlights of talks with:
- Ethan Smith, founder and CEO, Graphite
- Susan Su, startup growth advisor, executive-in-residence, Sound Ventures
- Asher King-Abramson, founder, Got Users
If you’d like to hear or watch these conversations in their entirety, we’ve embedded the videos below.
Ethan Smith: How to build a high-performance SEO engine
Relying on internet searches to learn about growth topics like search engine optimization leads to a rabbit hole of LinkedIn thinkfluencer musings and decade-old Quora posts. Insights are few and far between, because SEO has changed dramatically as Google has squashed spammy techniques “specialists” have pushed for years.
Ethan Smith, owner of growth agency Graphite, says Google didn’t kill SEO, but the channel has evolved. “SEO has built a negative reputation over time of being spammy,” Smith says. “The typical flow of an SEO historically has been: I need to find every single keyword I possibly can find and auto-generate a mediocre page for each of those keywords, the user experience doesn’t really matter, content can be automated and spun, the key is fooling the bot.”
Artificial intelligence has disrupted this flow as algorithms have abandoned hard-coded rules for more flexible designs that are less vulnerable to being gamed. What SEO looks like today, Smith says, is all about trying to “figure out what the algorithm is trying to accomplish and try to accomplish the same thing.” Google’s algorithms aren’t looking for buckets of keywords, they’re looking to distill a user’s intent.
The key to building a strategy around SEO as a company breaks down into six steps surrounding intent, says Smith:
- Target by intent
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TikTok is a marketer’s shiny new toy, but how do you optimize campaigns?
Tiffany Ou is the general manager, Americas at Nativex, where she leads go-to-market strategies for leading game and app developers.
TikTok is a rising star in the social media category. Since its launch three years ago, the company has secured 800 million active users worldwide. That makes TikTok ninth in terms of social network sites, ahead of LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest and Snapchat. As more people start using the platform and remain engaged, it goes without saying that TikTok is an increasingly desirable destination for marketers.
But outside the sheer numbers, is there any real sustenance to the platform from a marketing perspective, or is this just a temporary fad brands are flocking to? Here’s a look into what makes TikTok unique through a marketer’s lens, and a few things the platform can improve on to make it a permanent option for brands looking to explore mobile.
Better user experiences lead to more unique advertising
Digital advertising is only as effective as a platform’s user experience — that fact presents a unique differentiator for TikTok. Being in 2020, where content creators continue to blossom, TikTok provides an opportunity for literally anyone to reach millions of people with their content. It is a “platform for the people,” as the algorithm sends user content to groups of 5-10 people, and based on the engagement, it will continue sending it out to the masses. What’s interesting here is that it resembles an early era of Instagram, where all content was user-generated.
Additionally, unlike other leading social media channels, a user is focused on one piece of content at a time. TikTok videos take up the entire screen, which leads to more engagement and genuine interest from the viewer. That said, creative plays an incredibly important role in every campaign you run on the platform, especially when trying to grab the user amid a mass of alternative entertainment options. The TikTok audience is hyperfocused on viewing organic, visually stimulating content that could be the next big meme or viral sensation.
Creative is the key
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Decrypted: Chegg’s third time unlucky, Okta’s new CSO, Rapid7 beefs up cloud security
Ransomware is getting sneakier and smarter.
The latest example comes from ExecuPharm, a little-known but major outsourced pharmaceutical company that confirmed it was hit by a new type of ransomware last month. The incursion not only encrypted the company’s network and files, hackers also exfiltrated vast amounts of data from the network. The company was handed a two-for-one threat: pay the ransom and get your files back or don’t pay and the hackers will post the files to the internet.
This new tactic is shifting how organizations think of ransomware attacks: it’s no longer just a data-recovery mission; it’s also now a data breach. Now companies are torn between taking the FBI’s advice of not paying the ransom or the fear their intellectual property (or other sensitive internal files) are published online.
Because millions are now working from home, the surface area for attackers to get in is far greater than it was, making the threat of ransomware higher than ever before.
That’s just one of the stories from the week. Here’s what else you need to know.
THE BIG PICTURE
Chegg hacked for the third time in three years
Education giant Chegg confirmed its third data breach in as many years. The latest break-in affected past and present staff after a hacker made off with 700 names and Social Security numbers. It’s a drop in the ocean when compared to the 40 million records stolen in 2018 and an undisclosed number of passwords taken in a breach at Thinkful, which Chegg had just acquired in 2019.
Those 700 names account for about half of its 1,400 full-time employees, per a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. But Chegg’s refusal to disclose further details about the breach — beyond a state-mandated notice to the California attorney general’s office — makes it tough to know exactly went wrong this time.
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Virtual product placement is coming for TV and movies and Ryff has raised cash to put it there
In a world where ad rates are declining for traditional broadcast media, the corporations responsible for making the fictions that millions devour daily need to find a new business model.
Subscription services are on the rise — with every major broadcaster launching an on-demand service — and so are ad-supported video streaming services to replace the traditional networks.
But there’s another Holy Grail of the advertising industry, long thought to be too technologically difficult to achieve, that may finally be within reach. It’s the on-demand product placement of branded goods in a video, and it’s the technology that Ryff has been developing since it was founded in early 2018.
Product placement is an increasingly big business in the U.S., raking in some $11.44 billion in 2019, according to data collected by Statista. That figure is up from $4.75 billion in 2012. The same report indicated that roughly 49% of Americans took action after seeing product placement in media.
The effectiveness of product placement has even been proven by researchers from Indiana University and Emory University. They found that “prominent product placement embedded in television programming does have a net positive impact on online conversations and web traffic for the brand.”
And while streaming services enjoy the dollars their subscribers are throwing at them, they’re also looking at ways to diversify their revenue streams. Netflix and Hulu are both expanding their product marketing divisions and analysts like those from Forrester Research predict that product placement will be a huge moneymaker for the company as traditional ad rates decline.
There are companies that handle product placement already. Startups like Branded Entertainment Network, which works with brands and producers to place real brands into contextually relevant scenes in movies and television, and Mirriad, which adds branded billboards to scenes, are working to bring more money to platforms and producers.
Ryff takes the technology to the next level, using computer vision, machine learning and rendering technologies to identify objects in a scene and replace them with branded products that can be tailored based on customer data.
“The infusion of SVOD/streaming platforms into the market, combined with platforms like Netflix that are unsuccessfully trying to grow their subscriber base will force those same platforms to explore and embrace alternative revenue streams,” said Marlon Nichols, managing general partner at MaC Venture Capital, and a new director on the Ryff board. “In addition, consumers on paid platforms do not want their content consumption interrupted by ads. As such, product placement will be an important growth channel and Ryff’s new marketplace and unique technology set it up to be the unequivocal growth market leader.”
To continue its technology development and ramp up sales and marketing, the company has raised $5 million in financing. According to Crunchbase, Ryff had previously raised $3.6 million from investors, including a subsidiary of the Mahindra Group and undisclosed investors. The new financing came from Valor Siren Ventures, MaC Venture Capital, Moneta Ventures and Vulcan Capital.
“Ryff’s offering is well-timed with the rapidly increasing demand for solutions that extend the reach of a brand’s content and drive business results,” said Uday Ghare, vice president for media and entertainment at Tech Mahindra, in a statement at the time of the company’s investment. “We believe the market will continue to see a shift of brand dollars to both content marketing and programmatic advertising as brands increase their reliance on content-centric programs and look to scale those efforts.”
Ryff’s ads can be tailored to the viewer’s taste, the platform on which video is being distributed, the geography of the broadcast, the date and time of the broadcast and a broader demographic profile, according to the company. Basically it’s like AdWords for videos.
In a blog post writing about the rationale behind his investment firm’s capital commitment to the company, Marlon Nichols of MaC Ventures wrote:
Imagine a future where an IP owner can maximize the value of its content by putting it on the Ryff marketplace, where that content will be mapped for dozens if not hundreds of product placement opportunities and be layered with restrictions that comply with creative needs. Those opportunities will be ranked and priced by their effectiveness to drive marketing goals for brands. Brands can bid on in-video placement opportunities that fit their marketing strategies and budgets. 3D brand assets can be uploaded and inserted dynamically into content right before the moment of video delivery.
Ryff’s first disclosed partnership is with the “reality” television producer Endemol Shine.
“Ryff successfully takes the concept of product placement, the only advertising format that can’t be skipped by the viewer, and delivers a scalable and adaptable advertising solution that can be applied to any content, at any time and in any market,” said Roy Taylor, founder and CEO of Ryff, in a statement. “The result benefits all — content free from annoying distractions, audience-specific brand placement and delivering a new means towards monetizing video assets.”
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