AzoogleAds Branches Into SEM with Bazaar Acquisition

In an effort to morph AzoogleAds into more than just a performance-based affiliate advertising specialist, the company has acquired Bazaar Advertising, a San Francisco search engine management and advertising player whose technology impressed AzoogleAds’ executives.

The decision to go beyond its niche in CPA-based affiliate networking has already proved fruitful for the New York-based company, said chief marketing officer Michael Sprouse. He said AzoogleAds, which handles affiliate advertising for Blockbuster Video, recently convinced the movie-rental giant to also use it for SEM.

“That’s really the one that we are most excited about so far,” said Sprouse. “We work with them in our affiliate business in big way. After a period of a few weeks, we really proved to them that we could manage their search as well and we are already in the process of running these campaigns with them.”

AzoogleAds also now offers media services, said Sprouse. “We built out a media buying team internally and we are doing media buys for a handful of pretty big clients. A lot of this stuff is in the early stages and we’re really excited about it.”

But when it came to search engine management, AzoogleAds decided acquisition, rather than internal expansion, was the better route. Sprouse noted Bazaar, a company that had about 20 employees, had “mostly small players” as customers, so the acquisition wasn’t about buying a client list.

“It was really a technology and optimization play for us,” he said.

Terms of the acquisition were not revealed, nor would Sprouse talk about new clients, other than Blockbuster, of the firm’s fledgling SEM practice. AzoogleAds now has about 120 employees and offices in New York, Toronto “and now San Francisco,” said Sprouse.