Programmatic Ad Company Chango Acquired By Rubicon Project

Toronto programmatic advertising company Chango has been acquired by Playa Vista, California-based digital advertising company Rubicon Project Inc. (NYSE: RUBI) in a deal valued at (U.S.) $122 million in cash and stock (mostly stock).

Rubicon Project now owns Chango’s platform, which will give it the ability to target internet users and serve ads based on traffic patterns and online behaviour.

“Through this acquisition the company will bring access to an additional $35 Billion of intent marketing spend to the Rubicon Project marketplace,” says Rubicon in its press release.

“The team at Chango has done an extraordinary job engineering and deploying their intent marketing technology; they have built terrific products and a stellar team,” commented Rubicon Project CEO, Founder & Chief Product Architect, Frank Addante. “Chango’s technology brings keyword, contextual targeting and retargeting to premium display, mobile and video advertising. This will enable us to bring intent marketing budgets to an independent, open marketplace that serves premium buyers and sellers at scale for the first time.”

Chango’s programmatic ad retargeting platform allows marketers to build campaigns around bid tolerances specified in advance and rigourously target them at a particular demographic.

To the surprise of many last year, Chango took top spot in Deloitte’s Technology Fast 50 list, with Hootsuite, Shopify and Dejero Labs in positions 2, 3 and 4, respectively.

Founded in 2008, Chango posted five-year revenue growth of 69,800%.

“Joining the Rubicon Project team will enable us to collectively provide buyers and sellers with a more complete way of buying and selling premium advertising,” said Chango CEO Chris Sukornyk, who spoke in January at the Cantech Investment Conference. “This deal will enable us to leverage Rubicon Project’s massive reach of sellers, buyers and consumers to accelerate our combined market share and bring intent marketing to premium display, mobile and video advertising at an even greater scale.”

Back in December 2012, when Facebook was initially establishing its Facebook Ad Exchange (FBX), Chango was one of a small handful of partners selected by Facebook to help marketers most effectively target Facebook users within the confines of a budget that they specify in the bidding process.

Previous to the implementation of FBX, Facebook’s IPO and subsequent dip had many openly speculating that the company might become a tech casualty. But the ad exchange was one of, if not the, determining factor in turning Facebook’s fortunes around.

The Rubicon acquisition will allow Chango’s platform, which was already processing 1 trillion page views per month and billions of search events on search engines Google, Yahoo and Bing, to scale massively.

Chango now has 150 employees. Chango is Rubicon’s seventh acquisition, following iSocket and Shiny Ads in 2014.