Today is a big day for all of us at Collective, and for all the members of our Board of Directors, Advisor Collective, and Shareholder Collective who are a part of this first big little step in our journey. “WE” couldn’t be here without everyone working together. and is a testament to our core value that we are stronger as a group than as individuals. Which enabled us to close our first acquisition in a personal career record time.
Many of you have heard us talk about our hourglass strategy. The first Q1 side was our stepping in, restructuring the company, and level-setting the company so we had a solid foundation and white canvas to build on. Which included identifying and announcing our first two LOIs with DSL and BeOp.io. We hit 100% of our objectives in that stage as we entered the neck of the hourglass in Q2. Which certainly came with its challenges as we worked to baseline the company by closing out the past with our 2023 filings. They took longer than expected due to the company being run as a unified single-operating company vs fractured.
While we missed hitting 100% on the Q2 objective. We are 100% confident we will close that step out shortly as we now enter the most exciting next stage and the other side of the hourglass. The growth, scale, and trajectory side. Which kicks off today in Q3 into Q4 and beyond with today’s announcement. You are going to start seeing a lot of changes in every aspect of what we are doing, from communication to marketing and positioning as we start our next stage and strategy to not take market share, but to cannibalize it, and move the digital advertising and media industry into is biggest most important 3.0 stage.
Thank you all for your support and please join us in welcoming the DSL Digital team.
• All-stock transaction adds marquee global Fortune 500 B2B customer base, proprietary first-party
consumer data, and 20-member global services team.
• Collective Audience’s AudienceCloud enhanced with DSL Digital’s proprietary AI-powered AdTech
tool sets.
• New operational team, technology and customer base enable launch of Collective Audience’s
AudienceServices™ for global brands and agencies.
Collective Audience, Inc. (Nasdaq: CAUD), a leading innovator of audiencebased performance advertising and media for the open web, has completed its acquisition of DSL Digital, a provider of Marketing-as-a-Service solutions powered by proprietary AI technology. Collective Audience acquired a controlling 51% interest in DSL Digital, with an exclusive option to acquire the remaining 49% within the next two years.
The acquisition will form the foundation for Collective Audience’s new AudienceServices™ group, with multi-million-dollar profitable revenues growing at 20% annually. Collective Audience expects to recognize substantial revenue growth from the acquisition and AudienceServices in the second quarter and accelerating for the rest of 2024.
Since 2019, DSL Digital has been providing digital performance advertising and marketing services to select global Fortune 500 brands, including a market leader in enterprise application software and a Global 500 multinational professional services company. For these premier clients, the marketing services have included executing thousands of campaigns across hundreds of countries in multi-million-dollar advertising spend.
“The acquisition of DSL Digital demonstrates our ongoing commitment to our ‘shareholder collective’ by
making accretive acquisitions that scale our enterprise value,” stated Collective Audience CEO, Peter
Bordes. “DSL Digital brings to us an exceptional world class operational team, enabling us to scale
organically, while adding unique AI tools and capabilities to our AudienceCloud ecosystem.”
These new tools and services will become integral building blocks of Collective Audience’s organization, infrastructure and open web ecosystem. The company anticipates launching its recently introduced AIpowered AudienceServices group in the coming weeks, which is expected to drive incremental revenue growth in the third quarter and beyond.
“This acquisition also furthers Collective Audience’s growth strategy that involves transitioning to a new business model and executing on our vision for an industry-disruptive audience-based performance advertising and media platform for the open web,” added Bordes. “We see the addition of the DSL Digital team to our platform having a multiplier effect to our growth prospects and market expansion, especially in combination with our new strategic partnerships with Reset Digital and Insticator, and the previously announced acquisition of BeOp that we are targeting to close in the second half of the year.”
The new AudienceServices group will leverage Collective Audience’s new end-to-end platform, AudienceDesk™ powered by AudienceCloud™ which the company officially launched in March. The cloud-based infrastructure platform was designed from the ground up as a next-generation integrated digital advertising and media ecosystem. The new ecosystem empowers brands, agencies and publishers with audience-based performance advertising and media solutions designed for the open web in a way that unlocks unrealized value and introduces a new level of direct, integrated collaboration.
Collective Audience has already begun to productize DSL Digital’s tool sets and integrate them with the existing modules in the AudienceCloud™ platform. DSL Digital’s global 20-member team, based in the U.S., Canada and Europe, is leading the integration process. DSL Digital’s head of media,
Eugene Smelyansky, who has become AudienceServices’s new group media director, commented:
“We joined forces with Collective Audience since it shares our vision for revolutionizing the digital advertising and media industries. Collectively, we now have a greater platform for realizing this vision with the integration of our expertise and tools into AudienceCloud. We expect our new AudienceServices group to be extremely exciting for our existing and prospective clients.”
“We are now preparing to unleash the full suite of Collective Audience’s offerings to our existing clients,” added Smelyansky. “We are also building out B2B and DTC specific verticals for Collective Audience that will bring our performance marketing expertise to a larger base of brands and agencies.”
The acquisition was consummated in an all-stock transaction. Additional details related to the transaction will be made available in a Form 8-K to be filed by Collective Audience and available at www.sec.gov.
Investor Contact:
Ron Both or Grant Stude
CMA Investor Relations
Tel (949) 432-7566
BY PETER BORDES
