BUDDY MEDIA ANNOUNCES BRIGHTER OPTION ACQUISITION, ADDS PAID ADVERTISING SOLUTION TO SOCIAL ENTERPRISE SOFTWARE SUITE

Integration of Social Ad Management Software Into the Buddy Media Social Marketing Suite Eliminates Barriers Between Marketers’ Paid Advertising and Social Publishing

SINGAPORE, NEW YORK and LONDON, February 27, 2012: Buddy Media, the social enterprise software of choice for eight of the world’s top ten global advertisers, today announced the acquisition of Brighter Option, a London-based Facebook Ads API partner providing innovative social ad management software. With this acquisition, Buddy Media will be the only company to combine social publishing, applications, analytics, commerce and paid advertising in a unified software suite.

Brighter Option’s social ad management software enables marketers and agencies to create, monitor, optimize and measure highly targeted Facebook advertising campaigns. It is currently being used by major advertising agencies, including many agencies within GroupM, Omnicom and Aegis.

The acquisition comes after a nearly six-month process in which Buddy Media analyzed more than 20 Facebook advertising technology partners and concluded that Brighter Option had the most scalable technology, team and business model. Last quarter, the company’s social ad management software managed more than 92.5 billion impressions for more than 291 advertisers in 42 countries.

“Customers want to manage more of their social and digital programs in one software suite,” said Buddy Media founder and CEO Michael Lazerow. “Through Buddy Media, marketers can more easily manage and be more effective with their social and digital programs than with other incomplete solutions on the market. Smart social content gets the conversation started, then social ads provide scale, which in turn leads to larger owned media channels. It’s a virtuous cycle of increasing returns for brands.”

Unlike many Facebook Ads API partners that primarily offer managed solutions administered and maintained by the provider, Brighter Option’s social ad management software is offered as a self-serve tool for advertising agencies, game developers, brands, retailers and other advertisers – empowering them to manage their own Facebook advertising.

Buddy Media also announced today a deal with 24/7 Real Media, WPP’s marketing technology company, to use Brighter Option’s social ad management software to power Facebook ads for its clients worldwide. Additional partners will be announced shortly.

“We are very pleased to be one of the first organizations to roll out Brighter Option’s social ad management software to our clients worldwide,” said David J. Moore, CEO, Founder and Chairman of 24/7 Real Media. "Our assessment was that Brighter Option’s social ad management software was the most powerful and easiest to use Facebook ad solution in the marketplace. With this in mind, the addition of this functionality to our broad cross channel, data-driven offerings made complete sense. It enables our clients to fully integrate social advertising into the rest of their online spend, while managing all of these channels on one connected platform. This partnership positions 24/7 Real Media as a leader in the growing area of social advertising.”

Social advertising is the largest growth area of online advertising, predicted to grow to $8 billion in 2012 and increasing to $10 billion by 2013[1]. Of this, Facebook advertising is the largest, with more than $3.2 billion in advertising revenue and 27.9% of all display advertising in the U.S. last year.

“Joining forces with Buddy Media will enable us to provide a comprehensive social marketing software suite unlike anything available on the market,” said Peter Goodman, CEO and founder, Brighter Option. “Brands and agencies simply cannot have their advertising teams and community management teams working in silos. Now, for the first time, they won’t have to.”

“By combining Buddy Media’s social enterprise software suite with Brighter Option’s deep audience insights and powerful advertising platform, we can bring a complete social marketing solution to the market,” added Andrew Craven, CTO and co-founder, Brighter Option. “We’re tremendously excited by the possibilities this acquisition presents us for developing powerful, complete, and easy to use software for social marketers.”

Brighter Option is Buddy Media’s second acquisition in the last twelve months. In May 2011, the company acquired social commerce and analytics leader Spinback, and integrated the technology into the Buddy Media social marketing suite as ConversionBuddy.