Mobile TeleSystems Public Joint Stock Company (MTS), a leading provider of digital and media services and Russia’s largest mobile operator, announced the acquisition of a 67% stake in Buzzoola Group (Buzzoola Internet Technologies and Buzzoola Advertising Technologies), one of the leaders in the native advertising market in Russia and the CIS, in order to accelerate the development of its own AdTech business.
The parties signed a binding agreement that enables MTS to purchase the remaining 33% stake in 2024. Buzzoola will operate as a separate independent company as part of Stream, a subsidiary of MTS. The company’s operational management will be carried out by the current team of founders and executives.
The acquisition of Buzzoola will enable MTS to accelerate the development of its AdTech business and increase its share of the advertising market. MTS will also be able to include Buzzoola’s advertising exchange (AdEx) and SSP platform, which will complement the Company’s proprietary DSP and DMP solutions (developing under the umbrella brand MTS Marketer), in its AdTech business.
Elena Melnikova, Director of Advertising Technologies at MTS
Combining both companies’ advertising technologies will enable large clients and agencies to effectively manage their advertising costs, will make it possible to track the entire customer journey and ad conversion, and will make ad inventory quality and cost metrics more transparent—including through proprietary anti-fraud solutions. Since 2007, MTS has been successfully developing AdTech and MarTech products based on data from the MTS digital ecosystem, Big Data and AI algorithms, as well as cloud technologies. Now in Russia there is a great deal of demand for import-substituting technologies that can perform at the same level as solutions made by global players such as Google, Criteo, RTR House and others. This requires investments in infrastructure and the combined strengths of key market players. Our main product is the MTS Marketer advertising platform, whose revenue in January 2023 increased by 37% year-over-year. We are growing and solidifying our position in the Russian advertising market.
Natalia Solodukhova, co-founder and President of Buzzoola
The future of digital advertising lies in effective performance tools, machine learning technologies and the creation of closed ecosystems based on unique data. As a result of the merger of Buzzoola platform and the MTS advertising stack, we introduce a new key player to the market with the largest own network of platforms in Russia and the widest possible range of advertising tools for both clients and publishers. The goal of the merger is to achieve the highest quality standards for advertising campaigns on the market and provide a high level of income and service for Buzzoola SSP partners. We are sure that the combination of our technologies, a unique portfolio of formats, MTS Big Data algorithms and end-to-end control of the entire advertising purchases chain will enable to achieve a significant increase in the quality and efficiency of the joint product.
