Perion moves closer to mobile ad tech with new acquisition

Israel’s Perion Network further extended its reach into mobile Tuesday with the acquisition of Paris-based MakeMeReach, one of Europe’s leading social media advertising platforms. The acquisition bolsters Perion’s Grow Mobile automated mobile marketing platform and expands its reach into social media.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Perion, which went public on the NASDAQ several years ago, has been moving away from its previous business model of working with search engines, especially Google, to distribute software for PCs, and moving towards optimizing mobile campaigns.

To that end, Perion last year acquired Grow Mobile, a San Francisco company that allows businesses to buy mobile ads and keep track of their effectiveness from a single dashboard. Grow Mobile became part of Perion’s mobile marketing division, which was recently created to address the advertising needs of mobile app developers, providing a comprehensive technical and platform solution.

Shai Gottesdiener (Photo credit: Courtesy)

MakeMeReach now joins that platform, and will contribute to the company’s growth, said Shai Gottesdiener, General Manager of Perion’s mobile marketing division. MakeMeReach focuses on managing social advertising campaigns for leading brands such as Coca-Cola, BMW, Nestle and IKEA.

As a Facebook Preferred Marketing Partner (PMD) and Twitter Marketing Platform Partner (MPP), MakeMeReach will enable Perion to expand the capabilities of Grow Mobile, helping developers scale their user acquisition campaigns on a single, centralized platform for a wide range of traffic sources. MakeMeReach’s Paris location will give Perion a base of operations for Europe. Grow Mobile’s San Francisco office will continue to handle US sales and operations.

Over the past several years, Perion has had its share of troubles, with its stock price sinking as much as 71% off its 2013 high before recovering in November. Many analysts attributed that to concern by investors that Perion was too dependent on Google, which has changed its policies several times on how software makers can interact with its search engine. Investors, said analysts, grew concerned that policy changes by Google could be a problem for Perion.

Perion had been chiefly a consumer-oriented software company, with products like IncrediMail, a free program that provides backgrounds, emoticons, signatures, animations and more for both POP and web mail accounts, and Smilebox, which lets users share personal media (photos, videos, music) and content types (greetings, invitations, slideshows, scrapbooks, photo albums, collages, etc.) via any sharing method (e-mail, print, burn to DVD, post to Facebook, blog, Twitter or SMS). Other products include Photojoy, which converts photos into collages, puzzles and screensavers, Molto, a mobile email app, and instant messaging service SweetIM.

The Grow Mobile deal was designed to change Perion’s focus from consumer desktop products to mobile development, providing app developers with a single dashboard to buy, track, optimize and scale advertising campaigns.

“Acquiring MakeMeReach furthers our position as one of the leading providers of mobile marketing technology,” said Gottesdiener. “MakeMeReach’s mission of making it easy to advertise on social media aligns with Perion’s goal of providing developers with the most effective mobile advertising tools, making this a really great fit for our product and company.”