Today we’re excited to announce some big news for DCMN. We have acquired realzeit, a programmatic advertising platform, for a seven-figure sum.

In a nutshell, the realzeit team has developed a demand-side-platform (DSP) that allows you to do automated, real-time bidding on mobile ad inventory. They have developed complex algorithms for targeting potential customers and optimising budgets – and can cluster inventory and users even beyond factors like interests and demographics.

With the power of programmatic buying, realzeit’s proprietary tech stack helps digital brands with user acquisition, retargeting and reactivation campaigns. An important pillar of their technology is advanced fraud detection to focus on the customer-lifetime value and ROI. In the past, realzeit’s service has been heavily tested by companies like Zalando, PayPal and Home24.

This acquisition is our first step towards preparing DCMN for the future in a rapidly shifting media landscape.

The future is mobile

When DCMN launched in 2010, we were mostly focused on a specific part of the media industry: performance-driven TV campaigns for digital brands, based on a proprietary technology. In fact, we were pioneers in this area. DCMN was one of the first companies in Europe to apply performance marketing principles to the medium of television, which has traditionally been the domain of brand marketing.

But since then, there have been important changes in the way people consume media – which means our clients’ needs have also changed. TV is still an important mass medium for our clients, but we believe marketing is increasingly going the digital (and more specifically mobile) route. So with this acquisition, we are acquiring new technologies to be well equipped for what comes next.

“We can see that the marketing industry is developing really quickly.
By acquiring realzeit, we are well prepared for the future and will actively shape the market with our approach”, says DCMN’s Co-Founder and CEO, Andreas Dengler.

“At the moment, our technology is focused on attribution for TV and mobile
marketing campaigns. We’re already working with a lot of data and realzeit’s technology will allow us to optimize our clients’ media investments based on first party data. So, it’s really interesting for us to connect our existing product portfolio with the realzeit platform to make marketing campaigns even more efficient than they are today – in mobile marketing and beyond.”

Taking it to the next level: programmatic everything

DCMN is not abandoning television or other media channels. Nor will we focus purely on mobile marketing in the future – far from it. In fact, we want to extend the realzeit platform and apply it in new ways. Starting now, we can offer programmatic advertising campaigns for mobile marketing. In the future, we will be able to run programmatic campaigns for traditional media like TV and radio, a market that is still growing and developing rapidly in Europe and abroad.

We’re convinced that more and more advertising space will become available for programmatic buying. Today we’re starting to see TV networks and radio stations building supply-side-platforms (SSPs) for their inventory. In the future it will be possible to buy advertising space on TV just like you can now with Google AdWords. With realzeit’s technology stack, we’ll be able to run data-driven programmatic advertising campaigns across all media channels and not only on mobile devices.

“DCMN has the media expertise and industry connections, and realzeit brings the state-of-the-art technology stack. Combining these two strengths will be a very powerful thing, and it will enable us to accelerate the growth of our clients even more than we’re able to do at the moment”, says Andreas.

What happens next?

We’ve already welcomed the realzeit team to our headquarters in Berlin. The whole team – including founders Christian Graf, Markus Düttmann and Heiko Schmidle – are now part of our tech department, and their former CEO Christian is taking on the position of DCMN’s CTO.

Plus, the team also comes with a wealth of relevant expertise. Two of the founders, Markus and Heiko, bring years of machine learning experience into DCMN’s data science department and will help to make our marketing suite even smarter.

“This is an evolution in the realzeit story,” says Christian. “The product that we developed will continue to exist, it will just have a new home. We believe that DCMN can bring to the product a lot of new clients with exciting campaigns and also relevant industry contacts to accelerate the growth of our platform. I’m convinced that together we can bring our outstanding technology to the next level.”

We are now working on integrating the realzeit product into our platform. So in the near future, you will be able to access all of our tech solutions on one easy-to-use dashboard. Stay tuned! In the meantime, we’re already running programmatic mobile marketing campaigns on the proven realzeit platform.

Interested in finding out more about the realzeit DSP?
We’re happy to hear from you!

Get in touch with your DCMN contact or write us a message to hello@dcmn.com