Tag: Agreement

Manila, Philippines – Barely a month after Philippine media giants ABS-CBN and TV5 have announced their sales and purchase agreement, both companies have now agreed to terminate said agreement. This comes after both companies temporarily suspended their partnership following lawmaker and regulator concerns.

In a stock exchange filing submitted by ABS-CBN to the Philippine Stock Exchange (PSE), the company said that both parties confirmed that they have not implemented any of the transactions covered by the sale and purchase Agreement, as well as the debt instruments agreement.

In a separate disclosure, TV5 and ABS-CBN also announced that they have mutually agreed to terminate the investment agreement dated 10 August covering the proposed acquisition by ABS-CBN of 34.99% equity interest in TV5 and the convertible note agreement dated 10 August covering the proposed subscription by ABS-CBN to a convertible note to be issued by TV5.

As previously reported by Inquirer, National Telecommunications Commission (NTC) Commissioner Gamaliel Cordoba said that Congress should look into the previous allegations brought to ABS-CBN and its holding company Lopez Holdings during the 2020 Congress session on the media giant’s franchise, including tax payments and foreign ownership that ABS-CBN had refuted before.

San Francisco, USA – Pinterest has signed a definitive agreement to acquire THE YES, an AI-powered fashion shopping platform that allows users to shop a personalized feed based on their active input on brand, style, and size. Pinterest believes that THE YES’s leadership, innovative technology and talented team, combining shopping expertise with fashion industry credibility, will help accelerate Pinterest’s vision for it to be the home of taste-driven shopping.

Pinterest said, with hundreds of brand merchants on its platform, the team at THE YES has built an extensive fashion taxonomy that uses human expertise and machine learning to power a comprehensive algorithm in fashion. THE YES’s brand relationships and shopping expertise can potentially be applied to other categories on Pinterest such as home, beauty and food.

THE YES was founded in 2018 by CEO Julie Bornstein, an ecommerce and fashion industry veteran and CTO, Amit Aggarwal, a tech industry veteran. Over the past several years, THE YES has scaled to provide a personalized daily shopping feed that learns a user’s style as they shop with hundreds of merchants, including global brands and discovery brands across the fashion spectrum.

Upon the closing of the transaction, Julie will report to Pinterest’s Co-Founder and CEO, Ben Silbermann, and will lead shopping vision and strategy across Pinterest, creating a new and strategic organization dedicated to Pinterest’s taste-driven shopping efforts that will help steer the evolution of features for Pinners and merchants on Pinterest. Pinterest is excited to welcome THE YES team to join Pinterest following the closing of the transaction.

Silbermann shared that THE YES team are experts in building an end-to-end shopping experience. They share our vision of making it simple to find the right products that are personalized for you based on your taste and style. 

“We’re very excited about THE YES’s talented team and technology as we build dedicated shopping experiences on Pinterest,” Silbermann said.

Bornstein commented, “I’ve spent my career at the intersection of shopping, fashion and technology and have seen first-hand the valuable impact of building technology that enables brands to join a platform with ease while enabling customers to share their preferences. Joining forces with Pinterest to broaden our reach utilizing such an inspirational platform is an exciting and ideal next step for our team and technology.” 

In the months following the closing of the transaction, Pinterest plans to sunset the THE YES app and website to allow the merged teams to focus on technology integration and evolving our shopping vision.

The transaction is expected to close in the second quarter of 2022, pending the fulfilment of customary closing conditions.

Singapore – Nium, the global platform for modern money movement, has acquired Socash, a Singapore-based alternative payments network platform in a definitive agreement. The acquisition provides Nium with the team and technology to enable multiple forms of local payment acceptance for digital commerce, especially in emerging markets. Cash is still a preferred method of payment across the Asia Pacific and Latin American markets, and the acquisition of Socash allows Nium to accept cash for transactions online – bridging the physical and digital worlds. 

Socash brings together financial institutions and digital commerce merchants into a thriving network that allows consumers to deposit, withdraw, and make payments with cash from more than 30,000 local shops, cafes, and grocery stores.

Together, Nium and Socash become the full-stack, platform-of-choice for global merchants with capabilities for local acceptance, multicurrency accounts, foreign exchange, and global payouts.The acquisition is expected to close in third quarter of 2022, subject to customary regulatory closing conditions.

Pratik Gandhi, co-founder and COO of Nium, said that the Socash team has built an impressive platform that bridges payments in the digital space with payouts in the physical world.

“When compared to current in-app payment costs, we estimate Socash saves up to 30 percent in commissions paid. With this acquisition, Nium can offer a lower-cost payment processing alternative for digital merchants, spanning local payment acceptance through to global payouts,” Gandhi said.

Sydney, Australia – IPG Mediabrands, the media and marketing solutions group of IPG, has signed an agreement with audience measurement company Amplified Intelligence to help fuel Mediabrands’ IPG IQCPM tool, which allows clients the opportunity to optimize their media selections based on the value of the attention their media is generating rather than just the cost of an ‘eyeball’ or view. Said agreement takes effect immediately.

Mediabrands’ proprietary tool allows clients to move away from evaluating media on the price of impacts and focus on the value of the attention that the channel is bringing. Meanwhile, Amplified Intelligence’s attentionTRACE, an attention measurement platform, measures media impact across YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Tiktok, TV and the open web in an expanding list of markets globally, including Australia.

This is Amplified Intelligence’s first API agreement with an Australian media agency offering deep cross-platform attention data directly into their tooling. 

Mark Coad, CEO at Mediabrands, said, “We are thrilled to be the first Australian media agency to partner with Amplified Intelligence on an API as we seek more ways to build on our market leading approach to finding and defining value for our clients. It’s what we are about and how we continue to generate success for our partners and clients.”

Meanwhile, Nick Durrant, managing director of MAGNA, commented that this agreement is viewed as an important step in their movement away from the trading of impacts towards trading outcomes for our clients. He added that at their agency, they believe that value can be measured in many different ways, and that they have, therefore, created a suite of tools and value metrics to enable clients to focus on what is really valuable to their business.

“Now we can offer more. If a client values attention we will use new tools, powered by Amplified Intelligence, to value media based on this metric. We are also developing sustainability metrics to allow us to optimise plans based on their environmental impact. These tools allow us to optimize our clients’ media investment to the areas they truly find valuable,” Durrant said.

He added, “Attention is a precise and successful way to measure human interaction with media which makes it a powerful predictor of brand choice and a powerful tool for reducing waste. This enables us to optimise far more accurately to the outcomes our clients are trying to achieve.”

Karen Nelson Field, CEO and founder, Amplified Intelligence, stated, “With attention metrics Mediabrands will be able to demonstrate to their clients what we have known for a long time – the amount of attention a platform or format generates is consistently linked to various business uplifts.”

She added, “Attention measurement is vital to the future of planning and trading, and we are changing how the advertising industry thinks about the effectiveness of their media investments. The attention economy is here and we are excited to be working with Mediabrands at the forefront.”