Ahead of Its IPO Later This Month, Toronto’s Acuity Ads Makes Two Big Hires

Last month a few media outlets broke the story that Acuity Ads would be going public on the TSXV, via a $5.75 million private placement deal between the company and Wildlaw Capital CPC 2, a capital pool company.

The funding would come from Paradigm Capital Inc. and include Clarus Securities Inc. and Euro Pacific Canada Inc. Once the deal receives final approval from the TSXV, a new corporate leadership will be put in place, but its four cofounders will remain on the board of directors including Tal Hayek, Nathan Mekuz, Rachel Kapcan, Joe Ontman.

Today Toronto and New York-based Acuity Ads confirmed that the IPO (initial public offering) will happen at the end of this month. Acuity Ads calls itself the leader in the “programmatic marketing space”, or basically real-time ad buying. Its services enables advertisers to “intelligently target and connect 1:1 with consumers at scale.”

Raymond Reid, most recently managing director of Neo@Ogilvy, will assume the newly created role of President of AdScience where he will further develop Acuity’s products and partnerships.

“Raymond has the digital advertising leadership, knowledge and passion required to drive new insights and business intelligence for advertisers,” said CEO Tal Hayek. “The AdScience division was created to provide our brands and agencies with improved insights and measurement and under Raymond’s leadership this area of the business will explode.”

Ashley Bast will join as VP of marketing. In this new role, Bast will develop and lead the brand positioning for both Acuity & AdScience, in addition to establishing a strategic framework designed to drive growth.

“Ashley has been consulting at Acuity since the fall and we’re thrilled he’s agreed to join Acuity’s management team on a full time basis,” says Hayek. “Acuity is rapidly growing and Ashley’s extensive background in CPG at P&G, Campbell’s Soup, and Canada Bread/Dempster’s will help establish the organization as a trusted advisor to top brands and agencies.”

Acuity said in a release that its “point of difference” lies in intelligent targeting – the ability to reach the right consumers, in the right places, at the right times and for the right price explains. “Traditional advertising focused on creating messages and pushing them out to a broad audience, say women aged 24 to 54, and hoping something stuck,” said Hayak. “Today, Acuity uses proprietary technology to engage one on one with consumers around products that are interesting and relevant to them.  Our technology allows advertisers to track the key metrics that matter most to them, all the way from the initial ad impression through to impact on sales.”

Acuity has over 50 employees and over 160 active clients, and focuses on delivering a tier-one digital advertising technology platform. Acuity’s advanced programmatic marketing platform is powered by proprietary machine learning technology that allows advertisers to target and connect with their audiences across online display, video, social and mobile campaigns.

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