From being acquired by a public company to bankruptcy to being sold to a private company – oh, and going through the pandemic, as well – it’s safe to say Matt Leardini’s team has been through a lot over the last several years.
What the experience has taught Leardini, who previously worked at Buffalo-based Synacor for 15 years, is that there is hope in tumultuous times.
“It’s always darkest before the dawn,” he said. “Even when you think things are really difficult, the sun comes up.”
Synacor, a telecom software corporation, was acquired in 2021 by private equity firm Centre Lane Partners, ending its nine-year run as a public company. Centre Lane then sold off Synacor’s portal and advertising business segment – now known as iMDS – in July 2021 to publicly traded iMedia Brands, which this summer filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. During the selling of its assets in the bankruptcy process, iMedia was bought by IV Media, owned by Manoj Bhargava, billionaire founder of caffeine beverage brand 5-Hour Energy.
The most recent change in ownership marks the sun coming up for Leardini, president of iMDS, for a couple reasons.
One, his team is staying in Buffalo and expects to grow. He has about 20 workers based at 50 Lakefront Blvd., Suite 300, in Buffalo and about 40 staff in his entire division. He said it’s too soon to know exactly how many members he’ll add to his team.
“They’ve been through a lot. … We’re happy to keep them all on and grow from there,” he said.
Two, Bhargava also recently bought, through his company Simplify Inventions, a majority stake in the Arena Group, which is home to 265+ media brands, including Sports Illustrated, Parade and Men’s Journal.
This gives iMDS more relevancy in the advertising and media space, as well as opens up potential opportunities to work with some of the Arena Group’s well-known publications.
IMDS has three main products: a portal product geared toward telecommunications and cable providers; a programmatic product line that works with publishers to provide them advertising products; and the service to create over-the-top apps, which delivers content to devices using the internet, for content owners.
Historically, the business segment has created private-label apps. For example, building out digital ad products as a third party for a customer where the platform doesn’t have iMDS’ name or branding anywhere on it.
But if iMDS’ ownership essentially controls the publisher of the content as well as the app for the content, that gives more flexibility and control over the digital offerings.
“Having a branded property or several branded properties allows us to kind of be more in the forefront than just enabling the ad tech,” Leardini said.
Third, iMDS aims to take advantage of being part of a larger media company. On top of potentially having more publishers to work with, this change in ownership could give iMDS more resources, from investments to first party data availability, to grow.
“With having new ownership committed to growing in the media space, it allows us to take more calculated risks, be more aggressive in winning business, increasing the close rate on the sales pipeline,” he said.
