Mercury Media acquires Web advertising company

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

Money facts have been not disclosed.

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

The buy was made to provide the privately held Mercury a greater Web footprint with iMarketing consumers together with Dow Jones & Co., the parent on the Wall Street Journal, eDiets, Barclays and Yahoo! The 13-year-old iMarketing company, a survivor from 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 stated.

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 Online to more effectively engage would-be shoppers. "The two parts of media that are growing are the tv business and the online business," Barnes stated. "That's why this acquisition is a perfect marriage for what we do."

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

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