Pay-for-performance ad network Q Interactive announced today it has acquired Vente, a company that specializes in permission-based behaviorally targeted e-mail marketing.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
The acquisition comes on the heels of Q Interactive’s purchase of permission-based e-mail list concern Postmaster Direct in July.
Vente specializes in collecting e-mail addresses and their holders’ demographic and psychographic information through surveys and sweepstakes, an example of which can be seen here.
The company claims a database of 30 million names, 5 million of which are active and fully confirmed, or double opt in—the gold-standard technique for gathering addresses where new registrants must respond to a verification message before they are added to the marketer’s list.
The acquisition reportedly grows Q Interactive’s e-mail network by about a third.
According to Matt Wise, president of Q Interactive, the Vente buy—along with the Postmaster Direct acquisition—is part of his firm’s effort to build the largest permission-based e-mail ad network in the industry.
“We’re attempting to build a very large e-mail and lead-generation focused company by acquiring the white-hat players in this field,” he said. “There are a lot of unscrupulous gray-hat players out there.”
Vente was particularly attractive because of its behavioral-targeting capabilities, according to Wise.
“With Vente, we pick up 30 million consumer profiles, but the richness of data is vastly deeper than the rest of our network,” he said. For example, Vente’s database includes people who have indicated they suffer from specific types of allergies, he said.
“A consumer in our network may enter an address and start to take actions, such as buying a dieting magazine so we get some behavioral data on them,” Wise said. “The folks in the Vente database are answering hundreds of questions about themselves as they go through these survey processes, so there’s a tremendous potential depth of data.”
As a result, according to Wise, Vente has been able to get CPMs in the $150 range and higher. Typical legitimately sourced, permission-based e-mail files reportedly go for around $80 per thousand addresses.
“Vente has found a reasonable way to entice consumers to offer a tremendous amount of information about themselves,” said Wise.
Q Interactive is based in Chicago. Vente is headquartered in Omaha, NE, and will remain there, according to Wise.
According to Mark Brunetti, general manager of Vente, no layoffs are planned as a result of the acquisition.
“There are no redundancies. Our staffing is already pretty efficient,” he said.
