Infillion CEO Rob Emrich hopes that soon when people bring to mind the adtech company MediaMath, they’ll think of the brand for its entire body of work over its 16-year history and not just its recent downfall.
“If MediaMath was Will Smith — he had a whole acting career before he slapped Chris Rock in the face,” Emrich told Insider.
It’s been a little over three months since Infillion, a US-based adtech company that owns assets like Gimbal and TrueX, bought MediaMath in a bankruptcy auction for $22 million. MediaMath’s Chapter 11 had punctuated a stunning fall from grace for the early adtech pioneer that had once been valued at close to $1 billion and battled toe-to-toe for ad dollars with the likes of Google, AppNexus, and The Trade Desk.
Emrich’s team at Infillion is on track to relaunch the MediaMath demand-side platform and data management platform before the end of the year. A DSP is software that allows marketers to place digital ads using automation, while a DMP helps them collect and manage data. Infillion also wants to integrate MediaMath with its other assets so companies can enhance their own advertising businesses using its tech.
With the help of former MediaMath CEO Joe Zawadzki and his venture capital firm Aperiam Ventures, which is advising the company, Infillion has hired back 40 former MediaMath staffers. Those include Carl Millikin, who rejoins as svp of client operations; MediaMath’s former vp of engineering Vince Li; and Geoff King, who was formerly vp of product management.
“Multiple Fortune 100 brands” and two agency holding companies outside of the “big six” have signed agreements to test MediaMath’s new technology, Emrich said. It’s also managed to set the wheels in motion to re-integrate with all of MediaMath’s prior major partners on the supply side of the adtech market in the US and Latin America, he said.
The relaunch hasn’t been without its challenges. MediaMath’s bankruptcy left hundreds of companies owed more than $125 million, collectively. MediaMath’s entire staff of more than 300 people lost their jobs without warning, and some employees are still owed thousands of dollars in unpaid salary and expenses.
“Everybody was upset,” said Emrich of the industry reaction to MediaMath’s bankruptcy. “Some of them were so upset that they were just like, ‘We don’t want to have anything to do with MediaMath.’ Like the end of a romantic relationship: ‘I’m done,’ but some people were like, ‘Let’s be friends’.”
And there are some partnerships where the relationship status is “it’s complicated.” One of MediaMath’s biggest former customers refused to sign a master service agreement if “MediaMath” was listed as the contracting party, Emrich said. It was revised to say “Infillion” instead.
There have been other unexpected surprises, too. MediaMath’s servers weren’t in the cloud so Infillion had to go back to negotiate with all the different equipment leasing companies to end the leases and own the hardware itself. It was able to acquire those servers for 20% of what the company had budgeted for, Infillion said.
Emrich said the biggest learning, in speaking with former customers, was about MediaMath’s point of differentiation versus its competitors. The customers most keen to return, having been forced to move to other DSPs in the wake of its demise this year, were those that had spent years developing custom workflows on MediaMath for their own specific purposes. Rival DSPs might be simpler to use, but they weren’t as customizable for those clients, Emrich said.
Despite some hurdles, Emrich is bullish about his previous prediction to Business Insider, when he said Infillion planned to grow MediaMath into a $100 million-a-year business in four years.
“I try to stay cautious but I think we’re going to dramatically outperform that,” he added.
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