• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer @eriksass1, June 12, 2017

OwnLocal, a digital advertising platform for local retailers, announced the acquisition of Wanderful Media, originally created by a consortium of newspaper publishers and local media companies, which works with national retailers.

Founded in 2010, OwnLocal has built its business around helping local newspaper publishers convert print ads into digital ads quickly and easily and lower the barrier for local publishers and advertisers to create digital campaigns.

According to the company, its technology handles converts around 600,000 print ad campaigns to digital for 129,000 businesses every quarter, while working with over 3,300 newspaper partners in the U.S. and abroad.

For its part, Wanderful, previously known as Travidia, operates shopping Web sites and apps that allow consumers to search for local coupons and deals from national retailers and brands, including Find&Save’s network of over 400 local coupon sites, as well as CoffeeTable and the Wanderful Mobile and Regional Networks.

On the marketing side, retailers can use these channels to target local consumers based on location and purchase history data.

Wanderful was founded in 2011 by a consortium including Cox Media Group, Gannett Co., the Hearst Corp., and The Washington Post Co., with the purpose of acquiring Travidia, a newspaper circular platform, and its Find&Save property. Wanderful’s client roster includes national retailers like Walgreens, Kohls, and Office Depot, among others.

Other Wanderful investors include Advance Digital, A.H. Belo, Community Newspaper Holdings, E.W. Scripps, GateHouse, Lee Enterprises, MediaNews Group, and McClatchy.

According to the companies, the acquisition will help OwnLocal build more targeted local digital ad campaigns by providing access to meta data from campaigns executed by Wanderful and Travidia, which will be integrated with OwnLocal’s proprietary machine learning and computer vision tech.

A number of Wanderful employees are joining OwnLocal, but the company will continue to serve its existing customers as a standalone business.