LOS ANGELES, Dec. 13, 2017 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — engage:BDR, Inc. (ASX-AU:EN1), a global leader in the programmatic advertising and social media influencer marketing space, today announced it’s listing on the Australian Securities Exchange (“ASX”). engage:BDR has experienced high revenue growth since its inception in 2009, with a compound annual growth rate (“CAGR”) of ~48 percent. The company’s recent IPO capital raising was heavily oversubscribed. After scaling back its oversubscriptions, the company issued 50 million shares at $0.20 per share, and 30 million tradable options exercisable at 25 cents per share (for 3 years) to raise $10m. engage:BDR is expected to have an IPO market capitalisation on listing day of ~$50m.

engage:BDR was founded by Ted Dhanik, the former Head of Strategic Marketing at Myspace, Kurtis Rintala and Kenneth Kwan, and is led by a highly experienced Board, including Non-Executive director Tom Anderson, who co-founded Myspace in 2003 and sold it to News Corporation in 2005 for US$580m.

engage:BDR has developed proprietary programmatic technology to manage internet video and display advertising for advertising agencies as well as the websites that display those advertisements. The company acts as an intermediary between advertisers and publishers and consolidates vast amounts of advertising inventory, automates complicated workflows and offers precise targeting capabilities to advertisers at significant scale.

The company has also developed “IconicReach” an influencer marketing product. eMarketer has estimated that revenue from influencer marketing on Instagram alone (i.e., not including other platforms) was over $570 million in 2016. Sector growth outlook is also strong, with 48 percent of marketers saying they plan to increase their influencer marketing budgets in 2017.

engage:BDR CEO Ted Dhanik said, “We are committing all of the IPO proceeds to a range of growth initiatives. There was no vendor selldown in the IPO. The founders willingly entered into voluntary stock escrow arrangements in relation to all their shares to demonstrate to investors that they are committed to the long-term growth of our business. The IPO provides us with capital to help drive our next stage of growth in a very high growth market.”

engage:BDR’s Australasian expansion plans, interest from local investors and the credibility of the ASX, ultimately led the company to decide to list on the Australian stock exchange.

“We had strong interest from Australian and Asian investors, with the IPO book being more than 2x oversubscribed,” said Ben Faulkner of Sanlam Private Wealth, lead manager to the IPO. “The Company’s share register will comprise a mix of retail investors and institutional funds managers. Several quality institutional funds managers have invested, including the highly rated OC Funds Management.”

Apart from its core programmatic advertising platform, the company is a global leader in the social media influencer marketing segment, with its proprietary IconicReach Instagram platform automating the previously manual and extremely fragmented process of social media influencer marketing.

IconicReach also provides unique capabilities for Instagram influencer marketing through such activities as discovering influencers for a specific marketing campaign, providing engagement data to better vet influencers, measuring advertisers’ return on investment (ROI), providing comprehensive reporting and data analytics systems and allowing brands to launch campaigns across hundreds of pages with one click. The company believes IconicReach is the only self-serve influencer marketing platform focused on advertiser-created content.

About engage:BDR

Founded in 2009, engage:BDR is a leading cross ­device programmatic advertising company, recognised for delivering outstanding, integrated Display and Video advertising experiences. The Company provides innovative advertising and managed service solutions to achieve various KPIs ranging from the greatest reach to the longest time spent with media. Our industry­ wide role and collaboration with publishers to deliver innovations that make advertising and publishing better is core to our mission!
The company was founded by several of the industry’s leading digital advertising pioneers.

Media Contact:
Blast for engage:BDR
Brooke Weathersby
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