German broadcaster ProSiebenSat.1 Media SE is acquiring a majority stake in esome advertising technologies, a tech company specialising in social media advertising. The announcement today came alongside news that ProSiebenSat.1 is expanding its ad-tech management team with the appointment of Jana Eisenstein, who has headed up Videology in Europe for the last six years, as executive vice president. These are the latest in a series of moves by the broadcaster to build a comprehensive ad tech stack, an effort to enhance the value of its TV ads.
Esome aims to help advertisers handle their social media campaigns by providing a platform to plan, executive and optimise ad campaigns through one hub, its ELI Suite. The company says it advises marketers on how to execute social media campaigns, and gives tools for buying ads on social media and coordinating campaigns across platforms. esome claims its software is used by over 200 national and international companies.
ProSiebenSat.1’s CEO Thomas Ebeling has spoken in the past of his company’s strategy to expand in areas which have synergy with its TV advertising business, and the esome acquisition appears to be part of that strategy. While esome will continue to work with social media campaigns, ProSiebenSat.1 also plans to use esome’s tech for other purposes, saying that it will be used for KPI- based optimisation of display and video, and later for addressable TV. It is not currently clear however exactly how the tech will transfer over to these different ad formats.
“The majority stake in esome is another boost for our positioning in the ad-tech sector and expands our expertise with KPI-based products in the attractive social-advertising market. With the aid of esome’s technology, performance-oriented and thus even more effective addressable TV campaigns will be a possibility in the future,” said ProSiebenSat.1 Group’s COO Christof Wahl.
ProSiebenSat.1 has also expanded its ad-tech management team by appointing Jana Eisenstein, previously head of Europe for Videology, as executive vice president of its base of ad-tech operations Advertising Platform Solution, where she will help drive growth of the department alongside Jens Mittnacht. These two announcements are part of ProSiebenSat.1’s goal of building up a suite of ad-tech services, which it hopes will both serve as a form of diversification and add value to its core TV advertising offering. This ad tech stack now includes customer journey and attribution specialist AdClear, data management platform The Adex, demand side platform Active Agent and programmatic advertising specialist Yieldlab, all owned by holding company Virtual Minds. ProSiebenSat.1 also owns video ad network SMARTSTREAM.TV and syndicated video marketplace glomex.
Ebeling spoke at last year’s Capital Markets Days conference about the importance of this ad tech stack for enhancing the value of TV advertising in the face of digital competition, and as a way of bolstering the ProSiebenSat.1’s HbbTV addressable TV offering. He suggested at the time that the stack was “almost complete”, though with a number of purchases made since then it seems ProSiebenSat.1’s buying spree is not slowing down just yet.
