Gannett may follow WaPo into social ads with BLiNQ Media buy

Gannett Co., the media giant behind USA Today and other properties, is reportedly buying social-media marketing company BLiNQ Media, which helps brands execute and manage advertising campaigns on Facebook and other social platforms.

It looks like Gannett might be thinking about taking a page from rival Washington Post’s playbook. According to a report at TechCrunch, the media giant behind USA Today, CareerBuilder and other properties, plans to buy social-media marketing company BLiNQ Media for up to $92 million. The company, which helps brands execute and manage advertising campaigns on Facebook, is very similar to SocialCode, Washington Post’s subsidiary that launched last year, and could give the company a new way to bring in ad revenue as traditional audiences migrate to social platforms.

As my colleague Mathew Ingram recently wrote, the Post has been more innovative than many of its rivals with its new media projects. In addition to SocialCode, the company has launched the Trove news-recommendation service and a social reader app on Facebook. Don Graham, the company’s CEO and a member of Facebook’s board, has been vocal about going “where the readers are.”

Gannett purchased digital marketing company PointRoll in 2005 and social media tech company Ripple6 in 2008, but the addition of BLiNQ could help it make new headway in the emerging social media management space, which has recently seen heightened activity. In the past few months, Buddy Media, Vitrue, Involver and Wildfire have all been snapped by tech heavyweights Salesforce, Oracle and Google.

Gannett already has relationships with national and local advertisers through its many media properties, and according to TechCrunch the company has been working with BLiNQ for the past year.

Gannett Blog author Jim Hopkins says the reported acquisition could be one of the biggest ever signed by Gannett, with the other candidate being the reported $100 million the company paid for PointRoll. He also points out that in the company’s recent earnings call, CEO Gracia Martore said investments in “strategic initiatives” were expected to reach no more than $10 million to $15 million in the third quarter — although TechCrunch says the BLiNQ buy would be paid out over three to four years, with $23 million paid upfront.

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Google adds social advertising startup Wildfire to its ad tech stack

On the heels of other social advertising startup acquisitions, Google on Tuesday announced that it has purchased Redwood City, Calif.-based Wildfire, saying that social marketing can complement the other online advertising services Google already provides.

Yet another social media management startup is off the market. Google today announced that it has purchased the Redwood City, Calif.-based Wildfire, which helps marketers manage their campaigns and presence on Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms.

In a blog post, the tech giant said the four-year-old company founded by Victoria Ransom and Alain Chuard would be joining Google to build out the stack of services it offers advertisers. Wildfire’s social advertising capabilities will ultimately complement and integrate with services from Admeld (which has helped serve ads in Facebook’s social apps), DoubleClick (which lets advertisers run and measure ads across social sites) and of course, Google’s own social platform, Google+.

“Indeed, a social presence can complement all marketing campaigns—search, display, video, mobile, offline ads and more,” Jason Miller, product development manager, said in the post.

The purchase, which was reportedly in the neighborhood of $250 million comes on the heels of Salesforce’s nearly $800 million acquisition of social advertising startup Buddy Media and Oracle’s (ORCL) decision to buy Vitrue, as well as rival Involver. Google was reportedly interested in buying Buddy Media but, according to tech blog AllThingsD, Buddy Media was more confident that Salesforce could actually close the deal given that regulators would give close scrutiny to any deal involving industry-giant Google.

Google’s purchase of Wildfire leaves just a few independent social media management platforms remaining, including Hearsay Social and Hootsuite.

In a post over on its own site, Wildfire, which has raised about $14 million in venture funding, said the company has grown to include more than 400 employees and 16,000 customers in the past four years. Interestingly, in thanking its partners (such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Google+), the company gave a special call out to Google arch rival Facebook.

“Were it not for the social media revolution that you have all helped to create, Wildfire would not even exist,” the company said. Going forward, it will be very interesting to see how Facebook chooses to work with Wildfire, which has historically been a very close partner of Facebook’s.

Ahead of Facebook’s IPO, Ransom told the Mercury News that she saw a future in which Wildfire’s workforce had grown into the thousands, with “a darn good chance” that it will have gone public.  Funny how things change.

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