Mercury Media acquires Net advertising company

Mercury Media, the Santa Monica promoting business behind the tv commercials for Ronco items, Shark vacuum cleaners, Zumba Fitness and Hoveround wheelchair-styled automated autos, mentioned it has acquired iMarketing, a boutique Net ad company.

Monetary facts had been not disclosed.

About 30 personnel in the Princeton, N.J.-based iMarketing are actually absorbed by Mercury Media, mentioned John Barnes, chief executive of Mercury. The transaction closed Dec. 31 and was officially announced this week.

The acquire was intended to provide the privately held Mercury a larger World-wide-web footprint with iMarketing consumers like Dow Jones & Co., the parent in the Wall Street Journal, eDiets, Barclays and Yahoo! The 13-year-old iMarketing company, a survivor on the dot.com boom, last year generated more than $30 million in billings.

Mercury Media specializes in what are known as "direct response" advertisements, which includes infomercials and one- and two-minute TV commercials that frequently end with an announcer encouraging consumers to call a 1-800 telephone number to buy a product directly rather than visiting a retail store.

iMarketing specialties, together with search engine marketing and advertising and strategy and analytics, will complement Mercury's already-strong tv business.

"Our business is moving increasingly to a world that is a hybrid of tv and online marketing," Barnes explained.

Barnes stressed the continuing importance of tv, calling it "the most powerful medium -- there is nothing that compares to it."

Increasingly, however, product makers are more focused on using the World wide web to more effectively engage would-be shoppers. "The two parts of media that are growing are the tv business and the online business," Barnes explained. "That's why this acquisition is a perfect marriage for what we do."

Mercury Media, which started 23 years ago, now boasts about 160 workers in its headquarters in Santa Monica and offices in Marlboro, Mass., Philadelphia and now Princeton. Most work at the Santa Monica headquarters. The firm is a leader in the direct-response promoting space.

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