Hanrahan’s Electric Media buys into Sales Online
By Catherine O’Mahony
The consolidation wave that has created supersize media buying groups moved to the online advertising market last week as relative newcomer Electric Media acquired a large chunk of the assets of Sales Online, the largest and most established player in Irish online sales.
Simon Ferguson, founder of Sales Online, who has been something of an evangelist for online media for ten years, said he felt it was time to move to something new.
The recent series of moves grouping media planners and buyers into umbrella entities such as CoreMedia and Magna increased downward pressure on online advertising rates, Ferguson said, so it made sense to consolidate to protect online publishers.
In some cases, he said, online prices had been driven down 20 to 30 per cent in the past year, although he said premium sites had held their own better than this. ‘‘We’ve built the biggest advertising network in Ireland, also the biggest mobile network.
After doing it for ten years you start to ask yourself what else is out there,” said Ferguson.
‘‘Dermot Hanrahan [of Electric Media] and I started to talk last year about initiatives to grow this market.
Clearly there’s an opportunity to grow some share and we saw that there was space for a super brand that would protect the publishers and help them reinvest in their business.”
Hanrahan, who set up Electric Media in association with the Irish Times, said the enlarged business would allow agencies to book comprehensive web campaigns with a single phone call.
‘‘The web is the most fragmented medium out there, but no buyer has the time to make a hundred phone calls. This isn’t about getting prices up, it’s about being the most important supplier in the market. We should be able to populate an entire online schedule for almost any brand,” said Hanrahan.
Financial details were not disclosed. Electric Media is acquiring all the Sales Online sales contracts for 30 websites in the deal, plus four staff.
The sites transferred will include ebay.ie, O2, breakingnews.ie, examiner.ie and thepost.ie Electric Media will then represent more than 60 premium online brands including those it already had, such as ireland.com, ticketmaster.ie and entertainment.ie. Ferguson estimated that these represented 60 to 70 per cent of the overall market.
There are still no accurate figures for the scale of online spend here, but Hanrahan said he guessed it accounted for between 15 and 20 per cent of media spend in the past year.
Ferguson, who will not have a role in Electric Media, said he would make announcements about his own plans in the digital marketing area in the next few weeks. He said the Sales Online brand would survive in a different form, in that it would be used for technology sales business.
After the transfer of its sales business, Sales Online still retains a sizeable digital marketing business and Ferguson is also a director and 50 per cent shareholder of Refresh Digital Advertising, a brand and creative agency.
