Alan Soclof: Hi Jared! It is great to reconnect. Aditude recently announced the acquisition of CPMStar – your first acquisition to date. Are you able to share a little bit about CPMStar and why you are excited about the Company joining Aditude?
Jared Siegal: Hey Alan. Great to see you again. We could not be more excited to welcome CPMStar to Aditude. I will start by giving a little background on CPMStar. CPMStar is a leading monetization and SSP (supply side platform) for gaming developers and publishers. The Company is the first and largest advertising solution focused on gamers reaching over 800M MAUS. They have phenomenal technology, global scale, and exclusive partners that help them meet and exceed advertiser expectations. They are a great company with a great team. We will continue to operate CPMStar as a standalone product and will be retaining the team of engineers and business development experts. This is also a critical acquisition for Aditude as it enters us into the space of managing direct advertiser relationships.
AS: Why specifically did Aditude want to move deeper into the gaming space?
JS: If you look at a list of all of our top publishers, they’re all in gaming. The gaming space is growing like crazy – both in casual and core gaming. Interestingly, the core gaming space is moving from a majority of time spent on PlayStations or XBOXs to PC browsers and desktop apps. When you consider this along with the fact that this demographic tends to skew towards the older side, advertisers see a real opportunity to connect with a hard to reach demo in a space they have historically struggled to connect with. Finally, there is also a dynamic where gaming has longer sessions where there are more opportunities to serve more ads. The CPMStar acquisition will help us become even further entrenched in this key space.
AS: Do you think that the CPMStar acquisition will be the first of many for Aditude? If so, what areas do you think you could see Aditude looking to explore?
JS: Yes. We hope to do many acquisitions. I could see us looking into SSPs or even entering the DSP space (demand side platform). I could also see us looking to acquire other vendors in our space that we’re competing with. We have the goal of becoming as big as possible, as quickly as possible, and as efficiently as possible while looking to diversify our revenue in the process.
AS Stepping back a little bit, how has Aditude been doing as a whole over the past few months? The last time we connected for an interview was already a few months ago after Volition’s investment.
JS: We are doing very well. We have obviously grown a lot between us hiring at a pretty rapid space as well as this acquisition of CPMStar. Specifically, last time we talked we were around 11 or 12 employees and now we are around 3x the size in just 6 or 7 months. From a business perspective, Q1 is going to be almost as big as Q4 ‘23 – which is huge for us and very difficult to achieve due to the seasonality in our industry. Specifically, we have also officially passed our 2020 revenue numbers in just March of 2024. Our CFO Josh has very high growth goals for us this year and, knock on wood, we are on track to hit those. Things are going really well. It is also great to see that we are becoming very well known in this space in such a short period of time – even the more premium brands know us. We need to continue to stay focused and as we grow continue to be viewed as a scrappy and fast moving company.
AS: It sounds like things are going great at Aditude! Keep up the great work.
JS: Thanks Alan! Talk soon.
