IDG Comms Acquires Mar-Tech Platform Selling Simplified

The business-facing media, data and marketing services company IDG Comms announced on Tuesday the acquisition of its fourth marketing tech firm in 18 months, a platform called Selling Simplified. The publisher declined to share the financial specifics of the deal. IDG Comms operates a stable of more than 200 editorial titles, including publications like Computerworld, TechHive and CIO, whose tech-minded readership provides a trove of valuable data to the company. The titles primarily serve a top-of-funnel function for the company—its advertising business generates only around 10% of its total revenue, said IDG Comms president Kumaran Ramanthan. Instead, the influx of high-intent readers allows IDG Comms to capture audience data through a variety of GDPR-compliant methods, which it uses to fuel its marketing and demand-generation operation. The company specializes in helping clients target decision-makers within companies responsible for making enterprise tech purchases. Its subscription-based platform business grew 50% year over year in 2021. It might not be the most glamorous side of media monetization, but it's lucrative, sustainable and demonstrates how effective media companies are as front-end businesses. It calls to mind the similar forces at play in Hubspot's acquisition of business tech newsletter The Hustle in February 2021, and the prediction that the next generation of tech companies will have a media company embedded inside a software company. With its acquisition of Selling Simplified, IDG Comms gains access to a dataset of more than 160 million business-facing records. It also folds in the marketing technology that Selling Simplified built, which uses machine learning to gauge the purchase intent of an individual based on their engagement with a marketing campaign. “Marketing today has to be powered by technology and high-quality data,” Ramanthan said. “So our roadmap over the last 24 months has been razor-focused on combining the best of both worlds. We’ve always had an engaged audience and great relationship with buyers, and now we have the technology.” Using audience to fuel its marketing-as-a-service products In addition to Selling Simplified, since June 2020 IDG Comms has acquired marketing tech platforms Triblio, KickFire and LeadSift. IDG Comms itself was acquired by the private equity investment firm Blackstone for $1.3 billion in June 2021, and the tie-up has helped finance the firm as it moves to swallow the highly fragmented marketing-tech ecosystem. The acquisition of Selling Simplified and the other recent purchases reflects the increasing importance of first-party data to marketers. As the internet weans itself off third-party cookies, the value of companies like IDG Comms, whose suite of editorial titles provides it with a steady stream of first-party data, will grow. The business model of IDG Comms demonstrates the increasing interconnectivity between editorial operations and marketing firms, as the latter will continue to rely more on the former for actionable information on potential consumers. IDG Buys Mar-tech Firm KickFire

MarTech

IDG Comms Acquires Mar Tech Platform Selling Simplified

The purchase is the tech publisher's fourth in 18 months

Mark Stenberg

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Mark Stenberg