• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, February 24, 2021

Centro today announced the acquisition of QuanticMind, which develops predictive advertising technology for digital media channels. The two companies were in discussions for 18 months, but financial details were not disclosed. The deal closed last week.

QuanticMind’s platform relies on artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to unify and analyze data, which powers its software for search advertising management and marketing intelligence visualization.

Shawn Riegsecker, Centro CEO, said full integration of the two platforms will take time. “We’re looking at the first half of 2022, about a year,” he said.

Centro’s long-term vision to enable advertisers to log in to one platform to automate and transact across all types of paid digital advertising began around the time Basis launched in 2018.

Today, Basis provides access to a DSP and vendor automation. Performance data and analytics from search engines are available, too, but today you cannot purchase paid search campaigns, similar to Kenshoo.

That changes with the acquisition of QuanticMind. The acquisition makes QuanticMind the AI-driven keyword and optimization engine for Basis. Once Centro completes the integration, it will enable advertisers to purchase their paid search, and programmatic advertising through the platform.

Marin and Kenshoo began by providing advertisers a way to purchase paid search.

Then they added the ability to buy social media such as Facebook, and Amazon. Their platforms were needed in the early days of paid search because Google did not have a buying platform supported by machine learning and keyword optimization. Then Google developed many of the same tools.

San Francisco-based QuanticMind came into the industry in 2011 from the opposite side of Marin and Kenshoo.

“QuanticMind focuses on back-end search optimization, rather than front-end workflow,” he said. “They build data science, algorithms, and AI into the platform.”  

The integration into Basis will build a paid-search ad platform using predictive analytics algorithms for keyword bid-management optimization on search engines and retail sites.

It also provides a marketing intelligence platform for consolidating disparate data sources into easily accessible dashboards and visualizations, and a customer data platform (CDP) that enables ID resolution by unifying and centralizing customer data.

Basis is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering with workflow automation tools, programmatic advertising through a demand-side platform (DSP), and business intelligence through a data analytics engine. More than 500 agencies and advertisers that have adopted it since its launch in 2018. 

QuanticMind’s 30 employees are now part of Centro.

They join Centro’s 700 employees across 44 offices that cover North America, South America and Europe.

As Centro integrates systems, adds capabilities and improves features, it is continuing to grow with 40 open opportunities in engineering, sales, services and more.