Criteo acquires e-commerce ad exhange HookLogic for $250M

Dive Brief:

Criteo, a performance marketing technology company, has agreed to acquire HookLogic, a privately-held developer of an advertising exchange for e-commerce brands, for about $250 million.
HookLogic partners with retailers including Wal-Mart, Target, Costco and Best Buy to sell sponsored ads related to specific items that appear in product search results on their web pages.
HookLogic, which has been around since 2004, has raised around $40 million in funding from Bain Capital Ventures, Fung Capital USA, Intel Capital, Mousse Partners and others, Recode reports.

Dive Insight:

The advertising technology space seems to be going through a major wave of consolidation, as a lot of the media reports on this deal also cite Salesforce's acquisition of Krux, which was announced a day earlier. But Criteo's purchase of HookLogic definitely has more relevance for the retail sector.

HookLogic's approach sounds a little bit like a twist on Google Product Listing Ads, the ads that retailers buy from Google AdWords to appear in search results for products. With HookLogic, brands bid on ad space on a specific e-commerce site in hopes of driving traffic to their products on that site. HookLogic then shares the resulting revenue with its retailer and e-commerce partners.

While many reports call New York-based HookLogic a startup in the ad technology space, it has been around for 12 years. Maybe the description is a reference to overall company size, or the fact that the firm sold for nine figures instead of more, but HookLogic has a partner and customer list — Wal-Mart, Tesco, Target, Asda, Best Buy, Macy’s, Expedia, Hasbro, Intel, LG, L’Oreal, Mondelez, Philips, Microsoft and Marriott — that doesn't make it sound like it's still wet behind the ears.

Those partnerships mean that French firm Criteo gains access to a lot of retailers and brands it may not have worked with before. By integrating it own capabilities with HookLogic, it also can offer a much more comprehensive advertising and performance marketing solution to the e-commerce sector. The combination of capabilities, in fact, sounds like something Google or Amazon would provide, or would want to provide, which might be a big hint at just who this combined play is targeting as a competitor.