In mid-June, Google officially announced that it had signed an agreement to acquire Admeld, a New York-based ad optimization firm, for $400 million. Now, even as Google faces antitrust investigations, it appears the company will gain Department of Justice approval of the deal.
A new report from Bloomberg indicates that the DoJ’s staff attorneys have urged the deal’s approval after finding that there is plenty of competition in the space, though it still must be approved by senior department officials.
When Google initially announced its intent to acquire AdMeld, Google VP of Display Advertising, Neal Mohan, wrote:
By combining Admeld’s services, expertise and technology with Google’s offerings, we’re investing in what we hope will be an improved era of flexible ad management tools for major publishers. Together with Admeld, we hope to make display advertising simpler, more efficient and more valuable, provide improved support and services, and enable publishers to make more informed decisions across all their ad space. These are all things our publisher partners have been asking us to further invest in. Of course, Admeld will continue to support other ad networks, demand side platforms, exchanges and ad servers, to yield the best possible results for publishers.
Here’s a video intro to AdMeld:
An Introduction to Admeld from Admeld on Vimeo.
In late July, Mohan said:
We’ve been discussing this deal with the Department of Justice, who are obliged to review the transaction because of its purchase price. As they do for many acquisitions, they have sent us a “second request”, which means that they are asking for more information in order to complete their review of this particular acquisition. This doesn’t surprise us, as today’s display advertising industry is very new and highly complex. But we’ll work to enable this review to be concluded as quickly as possible – display advertising is highly competitive and fast moving, and we don’t want our efforts to bring better services to our clients to be delayed.
It looks like the whole thing may be closer to a conclusion.
Google recently won DoJ approval of another big acquisition in ITA Software, and there was a much bigger stink made (among competitors) about that one. Granted, that approval did come with conditions.
