Corporate Investors Love FirstPartyCapital; Long-Form Branded Content Gaining Momentum; Yields Getting High On Walled Garden Supply
This is the FirstPartyCapital weekly newsletter. It covers news and updates about the FirstPartyCapital fund and its portfolio companies.
Hello readers. You are getting this newsletter a day early due to the upcoming Easter weekend. And here is the weekly update…
Corporate Investors Love FirstPartyCapital
There were more acquisitions this week in MadTech land. Two European ad tech companies announced M&A news on the same day.
First up was the sale of AdYouLike to OpenWeb. The deal was reported to be around $100 million. Contextual solution Semasio was next off the rank, announcing its (undisclosed) deal with Fyllo.
FirstPartyCapital extends its congratulations to both companies - Dale and Kasper in particular.
Are there any ad tech companies left to buy in Europe? Of course there are (see here). But the question you should be asking: how do I get exposure to the next wave of privacy-first European, APAC or LATAM MadTech startups?
The answer is simple: invest in the FirstPartyCapital fund.
We accept both individual and corporate investors. The fund is now seeing a lot of the latter over the past few months.
Corporate investors (ad tech, agencies, ad nets and publishers) are looking to invest off their balance sheets into FPC so they have a stake in the future of this industry.
It not only gives them exposure to early technology but also allows them to avail of any upside in future MadTech exits.
TDG (ThinkDigital Group) is the perfect example of the type of corporate investor in the FirstPartyCapital fund.
The company is a marketing and commerce holding group based in Europe. Like most of the industry, it faces similar challenges transitioning to a post cookie/id era.
But instead of outsourcing to a Google or an industry body, TDG is actively innovating and investing in funds/startups that get it closer to business-critical technology. That’s just a smart strategic play.
It’s great to have TDG in our fund. If you are a corporate, we are happy to speak to you. Our fund is open to the whole industry.
Long-Form Branded Content Gaining Momentum With Marketers, Proving A Winner For Engagement And Brand Building
Building brand equity is a tricky and long process. The likes of YouTube have tried to convince marketers that the sugar-high of byte-sized content will help the process.
Long-form branded content has been abandoned at the altar of last-click attribution. But the tide seems to be changing.
With the advent of attention-based metrics, we are seeing a renaissance in long-form branded content. The custom brief is back, and it’s being built on a data-driven storytelling framework.
Our portfolio company, Biites, is a platform solution focused on the distribution and performance of this type of content - enabling brands to achieve higher rates of engagement.
In an interview this week with MarComm, Helle Jabiri Falck, Chief Operating Officer & Founder at Biites, discusses the opportunity for marketers.
The Biites COO goes on to explain how brands can create outcomes-based content without resorting to truncated video snippets dumped on UGC trash cans like YouTube and Meta.
In summary: long-form branded content should have a place in all marketing plans but you need the right tech to power it.
Yields Getting High On Walled Garden Supply, As Supply-Side Reaps The Rewards Of Audience Relationship
One of FirsPartyCapital's favourite industry analysts, Eric Seufert, had an interesting Twitter discussion this week on the state of supply.
Focusing on the burgeoning retail media space, Seufert noted that the top retail media solutions were “ad nets”. A fair analysis.
But it’s all very dependent on your definition of an ad net.
At FirstPartyCapital we once again see this as evidence of the growing power on the supply-side. We are in a walled-garden world. The ID/cookie framework that once powered this industry is dead. Legacy ad tech seems to be ignoring the realities.
The publisher/utility publisher is going to have a great decade. The fear mongering of this Google/Meta hegemony was way off mark.
Marketing spend is still finding its way to quality publishers. The flight to quality is happening right now.
Eric’s observations are on the money. But it’s more a renaissance of the supply-side than a return of the ad net. Publishers FTW.
Have a great weekend, readers.