Samsung Just Bought A Rich Media Ad Serving Company

June 17, 2016 by Dave Haynes

adgearSamsung Electronics now owns Montreal-based AdGear Technologies, Inc, a software company that has a rich media ad buying, targeting and serving suite that works across all kinds of screens.

The company describes its offer as full-stack advertising platforms that give customers “advanced advertising analytics, proprietary targeting, cross-channel attribution measurement, ad serving for advertisers and publishers, real-time bidding and exchange technology, and various retargeting solutions.”

The company, founded in 2010, supports interactive ads produced in HTML5 and provides SDKs for iOS and Android. Its biggest customers have been the government of Canada and a pair of newspapers that are transitioning from print to tablet, notably Montreal-based French-language daily La Presse.

Why does this matter?

Neither AdGear or Samsung say much about the intent, other than “to leverage our platform to fuel further innovation in advertising.”

It may have everything to do with Samsung’s mobile devices, and nothing to with digital signage. But just about every commercial display Samsung ships now has a system on chip processor installed, and ad capability could, in theory, just be an opt-in radio button, ie “Do you want to monetize this display through advertising?”

Of course, there’s also the much bigger market of residential smart TVs and smart, hyper-targeted ads.

Purely conjecture, I’ll stress.

A reader also points out that Samsung, in addition, has announced separately the acquisition of the cloud-hosting company Joyent. If you read the story you will see Joyent is also known as the incubator for one of the most popular javascript programming tools on the planet.

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