illumin Holdings Stock

illumin Holdings Inc. (illumin) operates as a technology company that enables marketers to connect intelligently with audiences across video, mobile, social and online advertising campaigns.

The company’s Programmatic Marketing Platform, powered by proprietary machine learning technology, is at the core of its business, accompanied by proprietary solutions for analytics-led video and mobile targeting that leverages data. The company empowers marketers by offering near real-time reporting and analytics, bringing accountability to programmatic advertising to deliver business results and help solve the key challenges that digital advertisers face.

The company has offices in the U.S., Canada, Spain, France, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Colombia and Argentina. Its key customers include both agencies and brands, including large Fortune 500 enterprises and small to mid-sized businesses.

The company’s technology enables programmatic advertising, which is the automated buying and selling of advertising inventory electronically. The platform is based on proprietary machine learning technology, the branch of artificial intelligence involving systems that learn from data inputs and outputs and can perform actions without the need for explicit programming. The platform has the capability to process billions of bid requests on a daily basis.

The company’s Programmatic Marketing Platform allows advertisers to manage their purchasing of online advertising in real-time using programmatic ad buying, a method of buying online advertising in which ad spots (called impressions) are released in an auction that occurs in milliseconds. The company purchases impressions for advertisers through agreements with publishers, ad networks and ad exchanges. Its technology platform benefits advertisers by enabling them to target specific audiences based on demographic and psychographic parameters, as well as manage their bid amounts to purchase the advertising inventory that is most relevant for their campaigns. Real-time reporting enables advertisers to monitor specific performance metrics and react and pivot quickly to optimize campaigns to help ensure they achieve consumer targeting goals and key performance indicators.

The company’s illumin enables the creation of consumer journeys with custom messages tied to propensity-scored audiences, increasing efficiency and return on advertising investments. illumin is an advertising automation technology that offers planning, buying media and omnichannel intelligence from a single platform, allowing advertisers to map their consumer journey playbooks across screens and execute in real-time using programmatic technology.

Programmatic Marketing Platform

The company’s Programmatic Marketing Platform intelligently connects digital advertisers to consumers across major digital advertising channels, including video, mobile, social and online; and is designed to help solve the key challenges that digital advertisers face. The platform is powered by the company’s proprietary machine learning technology that uses a voluminous amount of unstructured and semi-structured data to intelligently connect digital advertisers with the right consumers, in the right places, at the right times and for the right price. Given the extensibility and flexibility of the Programmatic Marketing Platform, it is able to address the needs of advertisers across a wide range of industry verticals and geographies.

The Programmatic Marketing Platform, exclusively provided through the illumin interface, is offered to the company’s customers through three primary service approaches to meet their digital advertising needs as follows:

Self-Serve: In the self-serve model, the advertiser runs their digital advertising campaigns directly within the Self-Serve Programmatic Marketing Platform, or programmatically using another system, after training and onboarding. A dedicated the company’s account manager is assigned to each account and provides proactive support and guidance to help achieve campaign success. Advertisers typically enter into one-year agreements with a renewal option, to gain access to the self-serve platform which includes real-time campaign dashboards and reporting features. Revenue is generated per impression served. Going forward, with the growth of the illumin self-serve component of the company’s total revenue, it is also moving to multi-year agreements with minimum spend provisions. Customers under the self-serve model, which include both brands and advertising agencies, are provided with training, documentation and online access to the Programmatic Marketing Platform to run their digital advertising campaigns independently.

Full-Serve (Managed Services): In this model, the company fully manages the campaign directly on behalf of the advertiser via its team of advertising operations and campaign managers and provides reporting on campaign metrics on key performance indicators as determined by the advertiser. These campaigns are typically governed by 30 to 90 day agreements and are crafted and tailored to the advertisers’ requirements and needs. Revenue is generated per campaign based on a pre-set budget from the advertiser. Under the Full-Serve model, the company’s advertising operations staff creates, develops and manages a complete and comprehensive digital advertising campaign, based on the customer’s target audience, strategic goals and desired results.

Hybrid: The company also offers advertisers a ‘Hybrid’ option, which is a combination of the self-serve and Full-Serve options described above and for advertisers that are not ready to run digital campaigns independently but are planning to become an its self-serve partner. This Hybrid option provides access to a dedicated the company’s account manager and campaign manager for three to six months, as the advertiser strengthens its own resources in programmatic advertising. During this time, the advertiser gains exposure to the Programmatic Marketing Platform and works together with the company’s ad operations team to create and launch campaigns and, when fully trained and proficient on the platform, the advertisers may progress to the self-serve model.

illumin: The company’s product, which accounts for a significant portion of its total revenue, is a Journey Advertising Platform under the brand name, illumin. illumin is the next generation of advertising automation technology, offering advertisers the ability to plan, buy, optimize and report on omnichannel advertising programs from a single, intuitive user-interface. Advertisers can map consumer journey playbooks across devices and communication channels, and execute in real-time using programmatic technology. illumin enables the delivery of custom creative advertising based on audience receptivity (time, place and context), which has proven to increase both efficiency and overall return on advertising investments.

In each case, customers may be provided with access to dedicated resources, comprehensive reporting and metrics regarding the performance of advertising purchases completed through the Programmatic Marketing Platform. In addition, the Programmatic Marketing Platform has the following key features:

Audience Targeting: The Programmatic Marketing Platform makes use of consumer profiling technology which gives advertisers access to over 500 million consumer profiles. Information available for each consumer profile varies. Based on this and other data, the Programmatic Marketing Platform estimates the probability of a consumer performing an advertiser’s desired action, and translates these predicted consumer response probabilities into a precise monetary value for each advertising impression. As the company gathers more data during the course of its advertising campaigns, the Programmatic Marketing Platform continually updates and refines the accuracy of its predictions, without requiring human intervention.

Tracking Results: The Programmatic Marketing Platform can track and measure audience reach, frequency and engagement goals through specific consumer actions, such as clicks, advertisement interactions and video completions.

Retargeting: Retargeting uses the Programmatic Marketing Platform to help return previous or similar consumers to advertisers’ websites, focusing specifically on the consumers most likely to perform a desired action because of actions they have already performed. This allows an advertiser to focus on consumers who represent high-value opportunities for re-engagement, aiming to reconnect with these users at an optimal time and in an optimal context, to achieve the advertiser’s goals.

Weather Targeting: The company’s weather targeting capabilities allow marketers to target their campaigns based on a range of weather conditions, such as temperature, wind speeds and humidity. These real-time targeting capabilities help to enable advertisers to achieve stronger digital marketing campaign performance, driven by more meaningful consumer interactions. Weather targeting allows advertisers to show consumers customized advertising based on certain weather conditions. For example, the company’s weather targeting technology enables a tire brand to show consumers ads for winter tires on snowy days and an online retailer to show ads for swimwear on hot summer days.

Growth Strategy

The company’s key growth strategies include allowing users to build, visualize and customize their consumer journey using a new, streamlined planning canvas; increasing Connected TV, display, mobile, social and video market penetration; expanding into additional advertising channels; and continuing domestic and international expansion.

Marketing

The Programmatic Marketing Platform is marketed to customers through the company’s direct sales team, which primarily focuses on advertising agencies and brands. The company’s direct sales team is organized by geography throughout Canada, the U.S., Europe and Latin America, with regional offices in Toronto (head office), New York and Spain; and sales offices throughout the U.S., Canada and Latin America. Customers are assigned to a sales representative who manages the customer relationship alongside a dedicated account manager and/or a campaign manager.

Competition

The company’s principal competitors include The Trade Desk Inc.; Amobee, Inc.; MediaMath, Inc.; and Google Inc. In addition to other companies offering programmatic and real time bidding solutions, the company competes with services offered through large online portals that have significant brand recognition, such as Yahoo and Google Inc.

Foreign Operations

The company has regional offices in Toronto (head office), New York and Spain; and sales offices throughout the U.S, Canada and Latin America. In addition, the company maintains servers at co-location facilities in the U.S. and in Europe that are used to store data and deliver advertising campaigns for its customers. The servers are housed in space that is leased by the company. For the year ended December 31, 2022, the U.S. sales accounted for approximately 68% of the company’s total revenues. The company expects to expand its business into other local, the U.S. and international jurisdictions in the future.

History

The company was formerly known as AcuityAds Holdings Inc. and changed its name to illumin Holdings Inc. in June 2023.