Online ad targeting company AudienceScience has acquired Consorte Media, a fellow digital marketing firm that caters specifically to the Hispanic market, we’ve confirmed. Consorte Media’s San Francisco office will now become an AudienceScience branch. The company is not disclosing the terms of the deal.
Consorte Media was founded in 2005 and had raised $10 million over two rounds of funding. Customers include Best Buy, Dealix, and SendMe Mobile (case studies are available on the company homepage). We hear that Consorte founder and CEO Alicia Morga will be leaving the company to pursue other ventures.
AudienceScience, which closed a new $20 million in funding late last year, was formerly known as Revenue Science. The company changed its name in early 2009 to better reflect its expertise in targeting specific online markets.
Here’s part of the press release AudienceScience will be sending out tomorrow that outlines the logic behind the acquisition (namely, that the Hispanic market is large, growing quickly, and is underserved by mainstream ad targeting services):
The decision to acquire Consorte Media comes at a time of significant growth in the Hispanic market that has traditionally not been answered by the advertising community. According to a report by Research and Markets titled “Hispanic Purchasing Power: Projections to 2015,” income-producing Hispanic households in the United States are expected to represent 13.8 percent of the population by 2015; during the past decade, that rate of growth was more than two times the overall national rate. Additionally, U.S. Hispanic purchasing power was projected to reach as much as $1.3 trillion by 2015, equaling a projected 12 percent of overall U.S. purchasing power. Yet, according to Los Angeles advertising agency Orcí, which surveyed senior marketers at 9,300 companies across the nation, 82 percent of marketers say they have no plans to start or ramp up existing Hispanic marketing efforts.