Engage:BDR onboards five new programmatic ad clients

Engage:BDR (ASX: EN1) is on course to close out the year on a high after onboarding five new significant programmatic customers to its books.

The news is expected to further bolster the company’s financial position following last month’s news that the company’s cash balance had swelled to $2.7 million in Q3 2020 in parallel to slashing staff costs by 61% so far this year.

In a statement to the market this morning, the programmatic ad company said it was pleased to present shareholders with a slew of new customers including ad buyers LoopMe, Sonobi, and AdMixer alongside programmatic publisher VRTCAL.

Engage:BDR also signed international video streaming platform TikiLIVE and declared that all its new integrations were on track to be live by the end of November.

According to engage:BDR, the new integrations into its programmatic ad exchange will buy and sell mobile apps and connected TV advertising inventory.

“These partnerships will provide the company with buyers (demand) and publishers (supply) from the US and other international geographies,” the company said.

The material terms of each agreement are almost identical with Sonobi, LoopMe, Admixer and VRTCAL signing up for an initial one-year term with automatic annual renewal thereafter.

The terms of each agreement state that engage:BDR will provide advertising inventory to each of its five new clients through “mutual, non-exclusive, non-transferable and non-sublicensable worldwide licences to transact on its advertising exchanges”.

Onboarding new clientele

All five new clients are US-focused with various ad requirements.

Sonobi is an ad tech company based in New York, specialising in connecting clients with what’s known as “best-fit buyers”. According to Sonobi, its main goals include, improving browsing experiences and ensuring relevant, high-quality, content that reaches targeted users.

LoopMe was founded in 2012 with “closing the loop on brand advertising” as its sales slogan.

The company specialises in mobile video and rich media, combining attribution, artificial intelligence (AI) and analytics to deliver what its customers are seeking: campaign performance.

LoopMe contends that increasingly more sellers are flocking to its novel ad approach because brand managers are struggling to maximise mobile advertising campaigns with existing methods.

Admixer is an independent “ad-tech” company, providing full-stack programmatic solutions for a variety of market participants. The company has been developing an ecosystem of interconnected products for over 12 years to “meet the needs of both buy and sell-side” in the ad industry.

The company claims to have over 100 supply and demand partners in addition to over 3,000 clients globally.

VRTCAL

VRTCAL describes itself as a “best-in-class mobile advertising marketplace” with a mission to reduce the vertical distance between advertiser goals and their targeted mobile audiences.

The company operates a proprietary marketplace seeking to enable developers and publishers to participate with brand advertisers in an efficient model. VRTCAL claims its marketplace also allows brand advertisers to “reach data-rich qualified developers and publishers”.

Finally, engage:BDR’s agreement with US company TikiLIVE is somewhat different from the agreement signed with the other four companies. The TikiLIVE agreement does not have an initial term of duration and is instead “valid until terminated” with either party able to back out at any time.

The agreement lays out the terms for TikiLIVE providing advertising inventory to engage:BDR and its clients, as a novel entertainment platform dedicated to supporting the “cord-cutter” revolution and banishing TV sets in favour of alternatives.

The company markets an over the top (OTT) and IPTV platform while focusing on delivering HD-streaming video, including live and video-on-demand (VOD). Also, the company provides content creators with a toolkit to produce and manage their own live and VOD streaming content.