An increasingly busy M&A cycle for gaming is coinciding with significant dynamics in specific sectors, notably performance advertising.
Yet even before Apple’s decision to disrupt the market that adtech companies had spent a decade perfecting, consolidation was evident.
The now lost ability to track the activity of individual gamers - announced back in July 2020 - has accelerated this trend however.
“Creativity has always been important for performance marketing. Now it’s even more important,” argues Vungle’s VP, Creative Labs & Brand Si Crowhurst.
And this is the context behind Vungle acquiring TreSensa.
TreSensa provides advertisers - mainly mobile game developers like EA and Zynga but also consumer brands - with a set of cloud-based highly automated tools for efficiently authoring ad creatives and playable content.
The goal for Vungle is to combine the expertise it currently offers its largest clients through the bespoke offerings from its Creative Labs organisation into these tools.
As Crowhurst puts it, this will enable Vungle to scale its output quality quickly, reaching many more customers without expansive - and expensive - hiring.
What's next?
But this is only part of the overall vision for the Blackstone-owned mobile adtech company, which now looks to offer a complete platform for the design and creation of mobile games, through to user acquisition and performance metrics.
Current activity validates the sector and our vision to build a complete platform.
The earlier acquisitions of game design intelligence company GameRefinery and UA company AlgoLift are important pieces of this strategy.
And, of course, all this is happening in a market in which competitors such as Unity, IronSource and AppLovin have floated on the public markets.
Similarly Zynga has acquired Chartboost to build out its own internal tools, the likes of Fyber have been acquired, and Moloco has raised further investment on a $1 billion valuation.
“It’s exciting to see this level of growth and the attention our peers are attracting,” comments Vungle’s corporate development manager Hannah Gilmartin.
“It validates the entire sector and our vision to build a complete platform.”
