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Mobile performance ad platform Vungle has acquired GameRefinery, a mobile game analytics service firm in Finland.
GameRefinery’s Game Intelligence platform has 70 customers around the world, and it provides developers with retention and monetization insights through its cloud-based developer tools. Customers include Zynga, King, Rovio, and Ubisoft.
GameRefinery offers deep contextual data sets across 160,000 gaming apps, and that will help Vungle’s platform to enable advertisers to target contextually relevant campaigns. The deal is one of many acquisitions aimed at improving user acquisition performance in the wake of Apple’s change to the Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA). Apple’s move will favor privacy over targeted advertising.
Back in September, Consumer Acquisition CEO Brian Bowman predicted that the change would hurt game companies’ capability to target consumers and it would lead to disruption in mobile marketing. And that would lead to more acquisitions. Last week, Otello agreed to sell AdColony to Digital Turbine for $400 million, and Vungle previously acquired Algolift.
GameRefinery brings image recognition and creative tagging capabilities that Vungle Creative Labs (VCL) will use. The deal combines VCL’s experience in creative work for ads and user acquisition with GameRefinery’s granular reporting on visual elements including styles and genre fit. That will help the combined company provide performance recommendations for its biggest customers.
“GameRefinery has built a leading platform to help developers build the most engaging and profitable games,” said Vungle CEO Jeremy Bondy in an email to GamesBeat. “GameRefinery’s world-leading contextual data sets bring innovative targeting capabilities to Vungle’s platform, driving UA performance in a privacy-focused landscape. GameRefinery’s image recognition and machine learning tagging will be leveraged by Vungle Creative Labs, strengthening creative insights to deliver contextually relevant stories.”
Above: Jeremy Bondy is the CEO of Vungle.
Image Credit: Vungle
GameRefinery cofounders Markus Råmark, Veli-Pekka Julkunen and Joel Julkunen, as well as the entire team, will join the Vungle organization. The team will continue to operate out of the company’s offices in Helsinki, Finland. Vungle has 270 employees, and GameRefinery has 30. The purchase price was not disclosed.
“Together, Vungle, GameRefinery and AlgoLift offer the only platform that speaks to game and product teams in the content and creative development process, marketing, user acquisition, and growth teams in the scaling stage, and data teams when measuring and refining outcomes,” Bondy said.
Bondy said that GameRefinery will continue to release reports on the game and app industries.
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