Velti has acquired Ad Infuse to strengthen its position in the U.S. market and sustain its growth over the coming years.

Velti will immediately integrate Ad Infuse's management team, award-winning technology and prestigious customer base into its global operations. The integration of the companies' services will allow advertising agencies to get end-to-end mobile media planning, campaign management, optimization, execution, analytics and hosting of campaigns all in one place.

"Velti has actively looked at many opportunities to expand our position as the world's largest mobile marketing and advertising company by revenues, by profitability and by global capability," said Alex Moukas, CEO of Velti. "Ad Infuse complements Velti in terms of management team, technology, products, business models, and geography and awareness among brands so it was a perfect marriage of two companies.

"Velti and Ad Infuse have spent about a month integrating the teams to make sure this was the right fit before we signed the deal today," he said.

This one-stop-shop addresses a key problem that advertising agencies currently face of having to communicate with multiple suppliers to run an integrated campaign.

Additionally, Velti's platform will provide a single point for: media planning across quality mobile inventory providers; tracking across any media channel that converts to mobile (including TV, print, outdoor); post-response interactivity with over 90 proven scenarios; and creative media utilisation including rich content, such as mobile Internet sites, applications, games and video.

"Ad Infuse was looking for a potential partner as early as the summer of 2008," said Brian Cowley, CEO of Ad Infuse and currently general manager of Velti, North America. "We enlisted the help an advisor who pointed us to Velti but we have always known of Velti from various conferences and working with them in the past.

"From a strategy perspective they are just the best fit for Ad Infuse in terms of management style, technology offering and bringing a combined mobile marketing and advertising solution which will benefit our clients with a comprehensive combined platform offering," he said.

The integrated company will comprise over 400 people across its operations in the U.S., Europe, China, India and Middle East.

Velti is already claims it is the world's largest mobile advertising and marketing company with operations in 35 countries a reach of over 2 billion consumers and some of the world's leading advertising and media agencies, brands, operators and publishers as its customers, including Microsoft, Disney, Unilever, Orange, Singtel, MasterCard and CBS.

"We have worked together for some time, so the integration of the company into Velti is very streamlined," Mr. Cowley said. "We believe that this is a good deal for investors and also for advertisers, brands and publishers."

The two companies hope to create a new category of advertising and marketing which will be revealed to the market in the near future.

"Although the real risk with this deal is in being labelled in the mobile community as just an ad network, this is in fact just a component of what Velti really is," Mr. Cowley said.
Velti hopes to be the first complete mobile end-to-end company.

"After the acquisition, this is the kind of company that the market wants: one place where advertisers, media agencies and brands can run an integrated campaign without having to communicate with multiple suppliers," Mr. Moukas said. "That's never been available before and after this acquisition Velti will be the one place to go for an end-to-end mobile offering for advertising and brand marketers."