Rich media advertising firm Crisp Media has acquired Smart Device Media in a move intended to address the growing market for premium mobile advertising.

Crisp Media builds, serves and measures mobile ads for big brands while Smart Device Media offers mobile ad inventory across a wide range of premium publishers. By bringing the two together, the companies? executives hope to become the leader in premium mobile advertising.

?If you look at the mobile advertising market, you see mobile ad networks focusing on direct response and paying lip service to brand advertising,? said Boris Fridman, the outgoing CEO of Crisp Media, New York, who continues to serve on the company board. ?Premium publishers have a very difficult time monetizing their inventory.

?Crisp Media can deliver scale and also focus uniquely on brands rather than paying lip service,? he said. ?Everything we do is brand advertising.

?Now we are also able to facilitate buying of campaigns across high-quality inventory.?

An integrated solution
For Smart Device Media, which offers premium inventory across a wide variety of categories including technology, women?s and business, the deal gives it way to better meet the needs of brands.

?As we?ve been building Smart Device Media, the one issue we kept hearing from clients was that they love the premium media marketplace but before they can think about media they need to figure out how to build ads, serve them and measure them,? said Jason Young, the new CEO of Crisp Media, New York.

?All of these issues needed to be solved simultaneously in order to activate marketers into mobile advertising,? he said.

Mr. Young cofounded Smart Device Media and was previously the CEO of Ziff Davis.

The combined companies will operate under the Crisp Media name.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

As mobile continues to grow, big national brands are looking for ways to advertise to their audiences on mobile via solutions such as Apple?s iAd. Crisp Media?s point of difference from iAd is that it offers open and flexible platforms and architectures, according to the company.

?IAd provides a platform and network to enable agencies to buy and execute rich media campaigns but it is not open, it is difficult to build on and it is Apple only,? Mr. Fridman said. 

?Crisp Media delivers ads across platforms and brands can plan a campaign, buy a campaign, build it and have it served on direct publishers or a network of premium publishers ? something like this did not exist until now for premium brands,? he said.

Crisp Media focuses on making HTML5 advertising scalable across device platforms for native apps and browsers. Its clients include Ford, Toyota, IBM, Procter and Gamble and Coca-Cola.

The combined companies will create an integrated mobile advertising firm for premium advertising.

?We are at the inflection point where big brands marketers are ready to get into mobile in very significant ways,? Mr. Young said. ?Together we offer the only turnkey integrated solution that will allow them to build, serve and measure mobile advertising.

?We want to be the leader in premium mobile advertising and we think the combination of the business, teams, platforms and positioning enables us to be in market right now with that type of leadership,? he said.

Final Take
Chantal Tode is associate editor on Mobile Marketer, New York