ExchangeWire rounds up some of the biggest stories in the European digital advertising space. In this week’s edition: USD$122m price tag for Sizmek; Sonobi establishes London hub; GroupM predicts USD$1 trillion global marketing spend for 2017; Factual and MediaMath partnership; Top ranking for OpenX app and inventory; More data for SpotX; and News Republic bought up by Cheetah Mobile.

Sizmek acquired by Vector Capital

Big news from ad management platform Sizmek: The ad tech provider has been acquired by a private equity company. Vector Capital will shell out approximately USD$122m (£92m) for Sizmek.

“We believe this transaction provides Sizmek with the resources and flexibility to execute upon our long term strategy of becoming the leading independent, global ad management platform”, says Neil Nguyen, president and CEO, Sizmek.

The terms of the acquisition stipulate that Vector will tender an offer to purchase any and all of the outstanding shares of Sizmek common stock at USD$3.90 (£2.97) per share. Upon completion of the transaction, Sizmek will become a privately-held company.

Vector Capital is planning to continue investing in Sizmek’s growth through new product development and cash injections for future acquisitions that could enhance Sizmek’s offerings.

The acquisition is expected to close in Q4 of 2016, subject to regulatory approval.

Sonobi Establishes European Hub In London

Fuelled by triple-digit growth, Sonobi is planning to establish a hub of operation in London from which to expand its European business. To that end, the ad tech developer has appointed Gareth Holmes as their EMEA managing director, based in the new London hub.

Media veteran Holmes joins Sonobi from a previous position as commercial director at PubMatic. Prior to PubMatic, Holmes was in charge of all European buying for BlueLithium and subsequently Yahoo! UK.

According to Sonobi, the company’s growth rate of 199% over the last year is primarily down to its guaranteed audience buying capabilities: “Our explosive growth has been driven by both our publishers and advertisers believing in the singular mission of people-based marketing: advertising to a precise set of buyer-defined customers on the world’s best media brands can deliver not only a quality ad experience but results for all parties”, says Sonobi President Anthony Katsur. “We are excited to extend the value we are creating for our clients in the U.S. into the global marketplace.”

Global marketing spend to surpass USD$1 trillion in 2017

For 2017, GroupM is forecasting worldwide marketing and advertising investments to pass the USD$1 trillion (£7.5bn) mark. A whopping USD$552bn (£420bn) of the total expenditure will account for advertising.

According to the WPP-subsidiary, digital growth will continue to soar, despite less dynamic growth in Western Europe than in other parts of the world. Investments in the digital advertising business will make up 99% of the net growth in 2016, compared to traditional media.

For 2016, GroupM has lowered their previous forecast. Instead of the earlier estimate of ad spend growth reaching 4.5% in 2016, GroupM now predicts a 4.0% increase, amounting to USD$20.5bn (£15.6bn). The correction is due to the normalisation of the Chinese advertising market. Given the slowdown in China, GroupM believes that the US market will return to its former glory as the major contributor to global advertising growth in 2016.

With particular regard to the UK market post-Brexit vote, GroupM’s futures director, Adam Smith, comments: “There is no evidence of a Brexit-driven recession at the time of this writing, and though some have deferred 2016 advertising investments, worst-case we still see that UK advertising growth will reach 4.5% this year, propelled exclusively by the growth of digital.”

Globally, the growth of digital continues to be strong, but is simultaneously moderating from 18% in 2015, to 14% in 2016, and 12% in 2017.

Factual & MediaMath partner up

Demand-side platform MediaMath is introducing a new targeting tool. Integrated in its dashboard Terminal One, the tool is based on the Geopulse Proximity by US-based data provider Factual and enables advertisers to deliver mobile advertising based on real-time data and information about the user's location. Location data is also sourced from Factual’s continually updated database and includes 95 million local shops and attractions in around 50 countries.

Tanuj Joshi, VP global media partnerships, MediaMath: “TerminalOne delivers an omni-channel marketing platform for our clients and knowing where our clients’ customers are helps them get a better understanding of who they are and how to engage with them. MediaMath believes this is a sophisticated way to share clients’ message with the right people they’re trying to reach, based on their location. Working on understanding how location unlocks new opportunities to identify and influence consumers while driving sales is very exciting, both for the industry and our advertisers.”

OpenX takes top spot in Pixalate’s global seller trust index

The quality of OpenX’s mobile app marketplace and international inventory has just been validated by a top ranking in Pixalate’s Global Sellers Trust Index for the month of June 2016. Both app and inventory received top marks in Pixalate’s ranking.

“As programmatic advertising continues its rapid growth, the overall health and success of the industry depends on being able to provide all participants in the digital advertising ecosystem with scalable, fraud-free marketplace solutions. OpenX remains focused on delivering the highest quality and best performing solution to our clients, and we are especially gratified by our number one quality ranking in mobile, given its growing share of advertising dollars”, comments John Murphy, VP marketplace quality, OpenX.

The monthly Pixalate Global Sellers Trust Index analyses more than 100 billion impressions per month. Global Quality ratings incorporate a series of metrics, including successful fraud detection, viewability, malware, engagement, domain masking, and inventory scores.

SpotX adds app store data to aid in-app video ad targeting

Management platform for video inventory SpotX has just announced the enhancement of its targeting capabilities for video campaigns in-app with new mobile appdata points.

The platform now allows advertisers to leverage information from the marketplace, such as the app ratings or number of downloads. This way, the quality of an app and its reputation can be determined, thus, identifying premium environment apps. The new metrics will be added to other targeting parameters on the Spotx platform.

According to SpotX, the new data will help advertisers better understand the value of premium applications, identifying valuable apps also among those published by small publishers and verifying the actual quality of the inventory of the most important developers. On the other hand, SpotX hopes the new data will benefit publishers in promoting cross-inventory deals, linking between areas of interest, such as sports and lifestyle.

"In the past 10 months, in-app inventory has risen from 16% to 52% of mobile inventory traded through our marketplace in the US”, explains Allen Klosowski, VP of mobile & connected devices, SpotX. "We expect it to overtake mobile web in all markets by the end of the year, with greater targeting abilities and more parameters to understand brand associations set to be key drivers."

Cheetah Mobile acquires News Republic for USD$57m

Another European start-up snapped up by China: French news aggregator News Republic is supposedly being acquired by Chinese software company Cheetah Mobile with a price tag of USD$57m (£43m). Neither company has yet commented on the news.

News Republic enables users to read entire articles via app instead of the publisher’s website, thanks to deals with hundreds of news providers worldwide that allowed the news aggregation feature. However, revenues for News Republic recently took a hit despite cooperations with Huawei, Acer, and other tech manufacturers.

News Republic is based in Bordeaux with further offices in San Francisco. Cheetah Mobile is a China-based tech company mostly known for developing widely-used Android apps like Clean Master and Battery Doctor.