Ad company Adiant says that it has acquired a number of assets from MarchEx, including the cost-per-click ad network formerly known as IndustryBrains (which MarchEx acquired nearly a decade ago).
Adiant CEO Ash Nashed said this should help his company’s ad network Adblade expand into financial publishing. MarchEx/IndustryBrains serves publishers including Bloomberg, Bankrate, MorningStar, and Investopedia, so Adblade advertisers will get access to inventory with those publishers, while the publishers will get access to Adblade’s network and technology.
“In essence, this allows us become the web’s largest financial network, period,” Nashed said.
He added that the possibility of a deal first came up a year ago: “I don’t think they were ready at the time. It took about a year of working together to make the deal happen.” Some MarchEx team members will be joining the Adiant office in New York City, while others will remain in Seattle.
The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
During our interview, Nashed also took a dig at the “native” advertising buzzword. He described Adblade as a “content-style ad network” — i.e., a network of ads that are formatted to resemble regular content.
“We don’t call ourselves native, because to us, native is a subset of content-style advertising,” he said.
