NewMedia SPARK plc Invests £2m in Unanimis
NewMedia Spark plc ("SPARK") is pleased to announce that it has invested £2 million in Unanimis Consulting Limited (Unanimis), an established premium digital advertising sales business following the announcement made today by The Unanimis Group Limited of its demerger into two businesses, Unanimis Consulting and Openads.
Founded in 2001, London based Unanimis, is the UK's leading digital advertising business. Unanimis offers advertisers the opportunity to maximise their return, from internet advertising and web publishers a completely outsourced solution to delivering significant advertising revenue. The Unanimis client list includes eBay, The London Stock Exchange, Gumtree and The AA.
Unanimis has been one of the UK fastest growing media and technology companies and is positioned to exploit the continued strong growth of the UK's online advertising market which grew 40% over the last year. In line with its growth plans, Unanimis has been reorganised into three new divisions; Brand, Relevance and Response, and is recruiting heavily to cope with the expansion in these areas.
Under the terms of the demerger agreement Unanimis has retained a significant stake in Openads - an open source technology for serving ads on websites. It has been developed over the past 8 years and is used by 1,000s of websites globally giving it the third largest publisher reach in global online advertising after Google Adsense and DoubleClick.
Jay Patel, Executive Director at NewMedia SPARK, said:
"We are pleased to be backing very experienced entrepreneurs in this fast evolving sector. Since its foundation the business has developed a premium product offering with a blue chip client list. We expect internet advertising to continue its strong growth and believe the Unanimis management team is ideally placed to capitalise on this growth. We look forward to supporting them in taking the business to the next stage in its development."
Khalil Ibrahimi, founder and Managing Director of Unanimis, commented,
"This is the first step in developing Unanimis into the leading digital sales business in the UK and beyond. With the support of Spark we will be able to ramp up our organic growth whilst we review several strategic acquisition opportunities in order to drive the business forward at a more advanced pace."
"We are pleased to retain our interest in Openads which we believe is a very exciting venture especially in view of the recent news regarding Google's proposed acquisition of Doubleclick."
Enquiries to:
Jay Patel/Andrew Carruthers
NewMedia SPARK PLC
Isabel Podda
Buchanan Communications
Tel: +44 (0) 20 7851 7777
Tel : +44 (0) 20 7466 5000
Khalil Ibrahimi / Alex Rahaman
Unanimis Consulting Limited Tel: +44 (0) 20 7299 7373
Notes to Editors
About New Media SPARK
NewMedia SPARK is a quoted venture capital organisation based in central London focused on early stage investments in the technology, media and telecoms sectors. SPARK's portfolio has a particular emphasis on digital media, software applications, technology and communications. As an investor, SPARK expects to add significant value to its investments through active support and strategic direction. SPARK is listed on London's Alternative Investment Market.
For further information, see www.newmediaspark.com.
About Unanimis
Based in London, Unanimis is the UK's leading digital advertising business. Unanimis offers:
• internet advertisers the opportunity to maximise their return from advertising and
• web publishers a completely outsourced solution to delivering significant advertising revenue.
Unanimis is a privately owned company with three offerings:
• Unanimis Brand
Since February 2001 Unanimis has offered media buyers direct advertising, strategic partnerships and sponsorship opportunities on its exclusive portfolio of publishers including eBay UK, The London Stock Exchange and The AA.
• Unanimis Relevance
Launched Jan 2007, Unanimis' open network optimises on its already successful brand proposition and exclusive reach into the UK. Advertisers can now buy content, demographic and behavioural audience clusters across the Unanimis site portfolio.
• Unanimis Response
With some of the strongest on and offline brands in Europe driving coverage for ROI campaigns, Unanimis' newly created response team is perfectly placed to maximise advertising performance.
Further information about Unanimis is available at www.unanimis.co.uk.