Vibrant Media Strikes Image Space Deal–CORRECTED

Vibrant Media, the online advertising service, will buy Image Space Media. The deal was described as part of the company’s “mission” under CEO Cella Irvine to expand contextual solutions. Vibrant Media has raised more than $20 million from investors including Fortis and ABS Capital Partners, Image Space has raised less than $5 million and is backed by New Atlantic Ventures, among others.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story mistakenly referred to ABS Capital Partners as ABS Ventures.

PRESS RELEASE:

Vibrant Media, the global leader in premium contextual advertising, announces today the acquisition of Image Space Media (ISM), the in-image advertising technology company.
The deal is part of Vibrant Media’s mission under new CEO, Cella Irvine, to expand upon its existing suite of contextual solutions with innovative placements that deliver high performance for top brands, new revenue opportunities for quality publishers, and relevant experiences for consumers. With several key innovations in 2011, Vibrant Media’s contextual platform (VXPlatform) now includes a suite of advertising products – Vibrant Image, Vibrant Video, Vibrant Bar, and Vibrant Display – in addition to Vibrant In-Text.
“Traditional ad models were brought online through pre-roll and display, but we create unique media placements that are designed for the interactive nature of the internet and deliver truly relevant ad experiences to users,” says Cella Irvine, CEO of Vibrant Media. “Roughly 30% of our publishers’ content is images and they now play an important role in our strategy to deliver new media placements.”
“ISM shares Vibrant’s vision to create industry-leading in-image contextual advertising,” says Kevin Tung, Co-founder and COO of Image Space Media. “By combining our image technology with Vibrant’s unmatched scale, robust contextual platform, and incredible sales force, we’ve built a significant offering. Vibrant is a company unafraid to invent – we love everything about that.”
The acquisition of ISM will enhance the delivery of Vibrant Image, a product that identifies static images within brand-safe content across the Web and embeds small overlays within them at the bottom of the image. Vibrant Image is a premium placement that is more contextually engaging than standard display ads.
Vibrant currently works with over 6,500 publishers and the top 100 advertisers, including Vodafone, Chrysler, and Unilever.
Jason Gole, VP, Digital Media Director, Universal McCann, says, “Vibrant Image ads enable Chrysler to engage users while they’re captivated by images, delivering a hyper-relevant and visually rich ad experience. We are very encouraged by the high level of performance we are seeing through this new, innovative ad format.”
For publishers, there is a significant revenue opportunity through leveraging image content. Every page viewed on Vibrant’s network generates approximately 1.5 images available for Vibrant Image – these photos can now be monetized.
ISM will become a Vibrant Media company, integrating easily with its existing VXPlatform to expand Vibrant Image through advanced performance and targeting capabilities. Click here to see a demo of Vibrant Image.
About Vibrant Media
Vibrant Media (www.vibrantmedia.com) is a world leader in contextual technology aligning billions of words across the Internet with relevant video, information, tools, and advertising. With over 6,500 premium publishers, reaching more than 250 million unique users per month (comScore, 2011), Vibrant Media gives top brand marketers the opportunity to deliver highly targeted advertisements within premium Web content and offers publishers premium editorial tools to re-circulate users throughout their websites. Vibrant Media works with top brand advertisers such as Microsoft, Unilever, Chrysler and AT&T. The company was founded in 2000 and has offices in London, New York, Boston, Detroit, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Paris, Hamburg, Munich and Dusseldorf. For more information, visit www.vibrantmedia.com, www.facebook.com/vibrantmedia, or twitter.com/vibrantmedia.