Microsoft Corp. announced plans to acquire Rapt Inc., the provider of advertising yield management solutions for digital media publishers. A key product that will emerge from the marriage of Rapt's planning capabilities and Atlas' campaign management capabilities is an integrated publisher sales workflow solution. This solution will improve upon the existing industry offerings for publishers' sales teams when used with Rapt's existing pricing analytics, inventory management and business intelligence products on top of Atlas' ad serving platform.

    Rapt's technology, along with its information and advisory services offerings, will become key components of the Atlas Publisher Suite, part of Microsoft's Advertiser and Publisher Solutions Group. With the inclusion of Rapt, the Atlas Publisher Suite allows Microsoft to provide its customers with integrated asset and inventory management, forecasting, yield and sales management, and ad delivery and operations.

    Rapt provides technology and strategic advisory services that enable advertising-supported businesses to succeed in an increasingly data-driven media marketplace. Through a combination of technology and strategic advisory services, Rapt drives incremental revenue and profit improvements for its customers. Rapt's software enables companies to price, predict, and provision their advertising assets, while Rapt's advisory services help companies design and implement best-practice revenue management processes across their organization.

    "Online publishers have a complex array of needs, and they require more attentive and sophisticated partners to help them solve these challenges," stated Brian McAndrews, senior vice president of the Advertiser and Publisher Solutions Group at Microsoft. "With this acquisition, we are uniquely positioned to help publishers succeed on all fronts. Our end-to-end solution will include workflow tools, ad package and delivery, turnkey distribution, content partnerships, and yield management and optimization."

    While search technologies are transforming wide swaths of the lead generation and direct marketing industries, those solutions are not consistent with the needs of traditional brand media selling and buying practices. Game-changing precision in targeting, delivery, and conversion tracking of digital media is creating new complexity, and with that, opportunities for growth.

    "The opportunity to join forces with Microsoft and to see our technology flourish inside a much larger platform was too compelling to pass up," noted Tom Chavez, founder, president and CEO of Rapt. "We're confident that, with Microsoft, we can continually improve publisher results and aggressively grow our combined client base that already includes over half of the top 25 U.S. publishers."  

    A consulting services practice drawing on our unprecedented domain expertise, the goal of which is to provide monetization technique that complements the technology today’s leading publishers employ. Examples include: instilling media sales operations with industry-leading approaches to analytics; driving best practice process and organizational design; and informing company-wide media asset monetization strategies.