ShowHeroes Group is acquiring Union Media, the London based joint venture between 5 leading EMEA video technology providers.

As a strategic partner for key European programmatic buying hubs, Union Media was founded in London in 2020, offering global advertisers the benefits of a single point of access for multi-market video campaigns, while ensuring their ads run on genuine, high quality regional and local market publishers. After a strong first year delivering brilliant results for leading global brands like Intel, Kellogg’s, Spotify, S. C. Johnson, Blizzard and Lavazza across more than 20 countries, it is now time for the entity to take the next step together with ShowHeroes Group.

ShowHeroes Group, Europe’s most innovative video technology and media group, that employs more than 160 employees across 10 countries, is acquiring full ownership of the joint venture to further accelerate the development of Union Media, while also officially launching ShowHeroes Group in the UK market to provide premium publishers and brands with its leading, independent instream video solutions driven by semantic technology and video content production.

The other 4 founding companies will remain affiliate partners of Union after the acquisition, ensuring that Union can continue to provide global brands with access to relevant local market publishers in 30+ EMEA markets.

Union Media will join the growing suite of exclusive sub-brands that sit under the ShowHeroes Group umbrella, including: ShowHeroes, ShowHeroes Studios, Viralize, The Digital Distillery and Garage.

Ilhan Zengin, CEO of ShowHeroes Group: “After two acquisitions and our successful market launches in France, the Netherlands, Italy and Spain last year, I am excited to continue the journey of the ShowHeroes Group. Bringing the group’s portfolio of brands and services to the UK is an extremely important, strategic step as it is one of the most important European markets for our industry. Adding Union Media to our portfolio gives us the opportunity to connect local inventory from the entire continent with our global demand sources, reach and expertise.”

Steven Filler, country manager UK of ShowHeroes Group: “More than ever we need to find ways for advertisers to tap the potential of local, high-quality publishers which provide genuine alternatives to the big platforms like Google and Facebook. Together with ShowHeroes Group we are able to further enhance our reach in the UK, supporting publishers with video technology, as well as the production and provision of video content that directly adds value for their audiences and creates a highly effective and safe brand building opportunity for our advertising clients.”

The ShowHeroes Group

The ShowHeroes Group covers all aspects of digital video. It forms the roof for the six ShowHeroes brands:

● ShowHeroes: Solutions along the entire value chain for digital video advertising, specialising in instream video and semantic technology for digital premium publishers and brands in Europe;

● ShowHeroes Studios: scalable video production for online content and ads, as well as other assets, such as animations and TV advertising;

● Viralize: a software-as-a-service solution for video advertising for small and medium-sized publishers in Europe;

● Union Media: strategic alliance of leading European video advertising specialists as a partner for large programmatic trading hubs, which was founded under the leadership of ShowHeroes in London in 2020;

● The Digital Distillery: exclusive networking event and content platform;

● Garage: a digital innovation hub at the interface of video, content, software-as-a-service and advertising.

The ShowHeroes Group was founded by Ilhan Zengin, Mario Tiedemann and Dennis Kirschner and operates from fifteen locations across Europe: Berlin, Hamburg, Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, Riga, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Amsterdam, Vienna, Paris, London, Milan, Florence, Rome and Madrid. The group employs around 160 people. For more information, visit https://showheroes-group.com