JUICE Mobile Drives Yellow Pages Canada Deeper into Programmatic

Last week Yellow Pages Canada made an acquisition that will ultimately position it to drive programmatic buying down to the local/SMB level. The company acquired JUICE Mobile, a Toronto-based ad technology firm with 2015 revenues of C$25 million.

According to YP Canada CEO Julien Billot, the deal bolsters the programmatic advertising capabilities of its own digital agency arm Mediative, while also positioning YP Canada to offer programmatic-based products to the local/SMB market, which is the vast majority of YP’s business.

“We’ve seen local grown from placement to lead generation,” Billot said. “To do lead generation you need a network of publishers to buy the leads and a brain in the middle to buy the leads efficiently and at the lowest cost possible. That is where programmatic is going. Perhaps [local] advertisers will not buy programmatic directly, but the machinery behind it is the same if you want to have a successful leads platform to sell to advertisers.”

Billot said the new acquisition will be consolidated into Mediative, creating a C$100 million business until for the Montreal-based publisher. YP Canada currently generates 62 percent of its total revenue from digital products, with the rest coming from traditional printed Yellow Pages. Billot has publicly committed to a plan to return YP Canada to top-line growth by 2018.

See the video below for more on YP Canada’s rationale for making this purchase, which closed last week. Billot will be a headline speaker at BIA/Kelsey’s ENGAGE conference, May 16-18, in Austin, TX.