XL Marketing Buys Adchemy’s Customer Acquisition Division, Adchemy Actions

XL Marketing, a company co-founded by former Apple CEO John Sculley, is announcing that it has acquired the Adchemy Actions division from ad tech firm Adchemy.

The company declined to share the deal’s price, but co-founder and CEO David Steinberg (pictured) said this will be XL Marketing’s largest acquisition from a revenue perspective (XL Marketing has made “seven or eight” acquisitions, he said, most recently buying UK rival Intela).  The deal is supposed to bring the company’s total revenue to more than $150 million next year.

Steinberg added that when XL Marketing buys another company, it usually grows the acquired business. In the case of Adchemy Actions, he pointed to the customer acquisition technology — he described XL Marketing as a “big data” company focused focused on customer acquisition and customer relationship management, but on the acquisition side, it sounds like he thinks Adchemy’s technology is stronger: “We’re going to be migrating most of what we do from a customer acquisition perspective over to their technology platform and off of ours.”

Adchemy Actions also targets industries that are new for Steinberg’s company, such as education and mortgage lending. (Update: A spokesperson tells me, “XL has been doing Edu for several years, mortgage is the only new sector.”) And it will allow XL Marketing to do more with display advertising (the company has focused on social media, email marketing, and behavioral targeting until now).

XL Marketing is also bringing on 34 people from the Adchemy Actions team as part of the deal. Steinberg said that team will be the basis a new XL Marketing office in Silicon Valley. That gives the company four main offices (or, to use Steinberg’s phrase, “centers of excellence”) — its headquarters in New York City, its London office for European and Asian sales, Hydrabad for development, and now the Silicon Valley office, which will focus on engineering and architecture (to a large extent directing the technical work in Hydrabad).

Steinberg said his discussions with Adchemy always focused on acquiring the Actions division, not the company as a whole. Adchemy, he said, has “pivoted in the past couple of years” and after the acquisition will remain focused on its product listings technology, which helps large retailers manage their search advertising campaigns.