Contact: Scott Denne
ADTZ Group picks up Glow in the latest instance of a tie-up of two social media firms. Social media is arguably the most potent means for marketers to reach new audiences and engage with known customers. Despite that, there’s limited potential to build a business around this channel: there are few companies reaching significant scale and exits so far have run the (limited) gamut from strategic tuck-ins to outright fire sales.
London-based Glow was one of dozens of players that launched with a platform to enable marketers to make their Facebook ad campaigns more efficient. A few years ago, Facebook was lacking some basic functionality that gave Glow and its peers an opening. Lately, though, the ad formats and new features – including custom audience targeting, the ability to integrate broad product catalogs and a growing suite of ad formats – have limited the need for such tools, which has made growth hard to come by for many vendors servicing this ecosystem.
In the past two weeks, there have been three tuck-ins in this space. Last week, Rakuten Marketing scooped up Manifest Commerce, a provider of a social ad platform for retailers with noticeable overlap with Facebook’s Dynamic Product Ads service (launched a year ago). And in mid-February, Sprinklr inked its eighth deal with the purchase of Postano, a four-year-old social analytics firm with $3m in trailing revenue.
Glow’s focus was on direct-response advertisers and it had built several tools that go beyond what Facebook offers today, such as data integration for building custom audiences and reach into Twitter. Indeed, all companies serving this market struggle with finding the right balance between offering tools that add value beyond what the core platforms provide. If they go too far afield, they narrow the addressable market – if they don’t go far enough, they risk seeing their opportunity swallowed up by Facebook’s next product announcement.
Though the opportunity to launch many of these businesses came from a deficit of product functionality on the part of Facebook, we believe the best opportunity for these vendors today is to provide a range of workflow tools and services (both media buying and strategy) to link multiple social networks. Our surveys show that social media is gaining a leading share of people’s attention; however, if Facebook continues to be the overwhelmingly dominant platform – and from an advertisers’ perspective, it certainly is – there might be little any company can do to build a sustainable, scalable business around social.
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