Grupo Cisneros’ RedMas yesterday announced the acquisition of Kontextua. It turns out that RedMas is in acquisitive mode and that Kontextua’s acquisition is by no means the last. Victor Kong, Chief Digital Officer of Grupo Cisneros, tells us that that RedMas is expanding its mobile capabilities with another mobile-only acquisition “which we hopefully can announce in less than a month.” Below the interview we just conducted with Kong on his thoughts on the Kontextua acquisition and Grupo Cisneros’ digital strategy.
Portada: Can you please detail the US Hispanic strategy of Kontextua going forward?
Victor Kong, Chief Digital Officer Grupo Cisneros: “Kontextua now has a strong inside partner for the US Hispanic market. Our goal will be to affiliate more US Hispanic sites to our network. We provide an additional source of revenue to 12,000 publishers because we create new contextual advertising inventory which is outside the normal banner placements. We currently have US Hispanic inventory from our partner publishers and we are looking to extend this network. With our strong presence in the US Hispanic, this will be easier. Besides the in-text and ads-in-image products we are working with Kontextua to create interesting online advertising solutions for advertisers.”
We thought RedMas was only directed towards mobile does this acquisition signal that it is extending to the overall digital media space?
“RedMas as a brand will expand into the overall digital media space but the team doing mobile advertising will be focused in mobile since mobile has some distinct features from online. In fact we are expanding our mobile capabilities with another mobile-only acquisition which we hopefully can announce in less than a month.”
Out of the US$ 2.5 billion Latam online ad market, how big do you estimate the in-text and the in-image advertising markets to be?
“It is hard to tell but it is clearly small and there’s a lot of room to grow. Kontextua has a very interesting technological platform, but the company has less than two years and had limited resources like any other start-up. With Cisneros’s $2M investment we are expanding our sales force and expanding into Mexico, Colombia, Peru, Chile and Venezuela and we will start introducing Kontextua’s online advertising solutions to all these markets. We are excited about the growth opportunities this will create.”
