Global digital behaviour aggregator company SQREEM Technologies had recently acquired contextual digital advertising platform TotallyAwesome, which will see TotallyAwesome’s extensive reach of over 900 million users and human-curated whitelists be integrated into SQREEM’s proprietary AI technology.

Through the acquisition, the pair will form the largest behaviour audience repository on the planet, reaching over 2.4 billion consumers in 80 countries. With the acquisition being a significant industry move in terms of providing safe contextual advertising options for advertisers not only in Asia-Pacific but also globally, what’s behind-the-scenes of this acquisition move from SQREEM and what new offerings can the industry expect?

For our latest Top Story feature, MARKETECH APAC spoke exclusively to Ian Chapman-Banks, chief executive officer at SQREEM to better understand their goal of acquiring TotallyAwesome, and what’s next for SQREEM in terms of offering new advertising solutions to new markets globally.

Broadened product offering and leveraged synergies

For Ian, the acquisition of TotallyAwesome significantly adds value to SQREEM by expanding its market reach to include youth and family demographics, bolstering its technological capabilities, and broadening its competitive edge with more comprehensive advertising solutions. 

“This acquisition brings new clients and cross-selling opportunities, creating additional revenue streams. Operational synergies from the integration lead to streamlined processes, strengthening SQREEM’s position as a leading behavioural aggregator. It also fosters new product development, driving innovation, and enhances SQREEM’s brand reputation and market credibility,” he said.

When asked what are the main factors that contributed to SQREEM’s acquisition of TotallyAwesome, Ian listed five factors–enhancing capabilities in targeted youth advertising, expanding market presence, leveraging synergies, strategic growth, and broadening product offering.

Speaking of enhanced capabilities, he notes that as TotallyAwesome specialises in youth digital media and family-friendly advertising, this will allow SQREEM to expand its reach in this specific demographic. Moreover, this complements SQREEM’s existing capabilities in behavioural aggregation and targeted advertising, enabling more precise and effective campaigns tailored to younger audiences.

“TotallyAwesome’s established presence in the youth and family advertising sector provides SQREEM with immediate access to a new customer base and market segment. This helps diversify SQREEM’s portfolio and strengthens its market position. The integration of TotallyAwesome’s user base with SQREEM’s AI-driven insights creates synergies that can enhance the performance and efficiency of their combined solutions. This includes improved targeting, better customer insights, and more effective and ethical ad placements,” he further explained.

Lastly, Ian notes that by acquiring TotallyAwesome, SQREEM can accelerate its growth trajectory and scale more rapidly, aligning with its goal to become a billion-dollar unicorn by 2026.

Improving advertising compliance, safety standards

For Ian, one of the biggest benefits of acquiring TotallyAwesome is how it has developed proper industry measures and solutions that include youth and family-focused advertising, content creation, and stringent compliance with safety standards like COPPA and GDPR–across it own suite of products.

“In APAC, SQREEM faces challenges such as navigating the diverse regulatory environments across different countries, each with its own data privacy laws and standards for protecting young users, like COPPA and GDPR. Ensuring compliance while maintaining effective engagement can be complex and resource intensive,” he remarked.

Some of TotallyAwesome’s solutions include contextual advertising expertise which can offer privacy-compliant, cookie-free advertising solutions, crucial for targeting youth safely and effectively; as well as ensuring safe and relevant ad placements across diverse channels like apps, gaming, and social media.

Ian also understands that despite many nuances on cultural differences and varying levels of digital literacy in terms of driving safe and effective advertising solutions in APAC, there is still a great deal of opportunities in the region. He adds that the region boasts one of the largest and most digitally engaged youth populations in the world. Moreover, he notes that this demographic is highly active on social media and other digital platforms, making it a prime target for innovative, youth-focused advertising campaigns. 

“By leveraging TotallyAwesome’s expertise in creating safe, compliant, and engaging content for young audiences, SQREEM can provide brands with effective tools to reach this lucrative market. Furthermore, the integration of TotallyAwesome’s programmatic advertising solutions with SQREEM’s AI and data analytics capabilities can enhance the precision and effectiveness of campaigns, offering brands unprecedented insights and engagement opportunities with the youth demographic in APAC,” he stated.

Strengthening cookie-less solutions and other advertising offerings

Amidst continued industry movement towards privacy-centric advertising solutions, Ian has stressed SQREEM’s commitment to enhancing its cookie-less solutions to better serve its partners and clients in the APAC region. For him, by leveraging advanced AI-powered behavioural analytics, SQREEM can accurately identify user patterns and preferences without relying on cookies.

“To ensure privacy and compliance, SQREEM integrates first-party data from clients while adhering to regional privacy regulations like GDPR and PDPA. Strengthening industry alliances and collaborating with key players allows SQREEM to develop and promote cookie-less standards tailored to the APAC market,” he said.

Ian also noted how technological upgrades, such as enhanced machine learning models and robust cross-device tracking, had enabled SQREEM to understand user behaviour through non-cookie-based signals, providing a comprehensive view of user journeys across devices. Moreover, innovative solutions like predictive analytics and scalable personalisation techniques further enhance user engagement and conversion rates.

“To support clients in transitioning to cookie-less solutions, SQREEM offers workshops, training sessions, and ongoing resources. Clear performance metrics and transparent reporting demonstrate the effectiveness of cookie-less campaigns compared to traditional methods,” he said.

He further added, “SQREEM aims to provide robust, privacy-compliant, and effective cookie-less solutions, ensuring its partners and clients in APAC can continue to achieve their marketing goals in a rapidly evolving digital landscape.”

What’s next for SQREEM globally?

Following the acquisition of TotallyAwesome, Ian had already hinted on his LinkedIn post that SQREEM aims to expand its presence and offerings to other markets, including in the Middle East and Latin America. For this, we asked: what’s the roadmap for this?

“Our recent acquisition, TotallyAwesome, will play a pivotal role in this expansion. TotallyAwesome offers a managed service for the curation of whitelists and safe, compliant activation for children and parents. This service will be crucial in rapidly building whitelists in the four largest markets in the Middle East (Saudi Arabia and UAE) and LATAM (Brazil and Mexico). These markets, characterized by a high percentage of young people, present significant opportunities for growth,” Ian explained.

He also noted that SQREEM already had a presence in the Middle East and LATAM regions through direct sales and distribution partners, and for them leveraging this existing infrastructure, SQREEM plans to scale up its operations by enhancing its local market capabilities.

“We are already operationally ready to expand, having set up channels in key cities like Rio and São Paulo during recent visits. This groundwork ensures that SQREEM is well-prepared to leverage its partnerships and distribution capabilities to penetrate these markets effectively,” he concluded.

Singapore – Singapore-headquartered SQREEM Technologies, a global digital behaviour aggregator company, has announced its definitive acquisition of Singapore’s TotallyAwesome, a contextual digital advertising platform specialising in youth marketing in the Asia-Pacific region.

The deal will integrate TotallyAwesome’s extensive reach of over 900 million users and human-curated whitelists with SQREEM’s proprietary AI technology to produce enhanced, precision-targeted web environments for young users and their families, significantly increasing safety in ad placements. 

Together, the pair will form the largest behaviour audience repository on the planet, reaching over 2.4 billion consumers in 80 countries.

Moreover, the acquisition strategically positions SQREEM to navigate the complex landscape of ethical youth marketing, especially as global conversations increasingly emphasise the responsible use of AI in targeting vulnerable audiences. 

By extending SQREEM’s product suite to include comprehensive, age-appropriate solutions, the purchase combines SQREEM’s advanced AI-driven behavioural database and TotallyAwesome’s robust understanding of youth audiences and their digital experiences across 14 key Asia-Pacific markets, offering brands and agencies an unparalleled ability to reach millions of young consumers and parents in a safe and compliant way.

The combined tech stack of SQREEM and TotallyAwesome will be accessible on a unified full-service platform, offering agencies significant cost reductions and improved operational margins. TotallyAwesome’s existing team, approximately 100 strong across key markets including Singapore, Ho Chi Minh City, Melbourne and Sydney will merge with SQREEM’s global workforce to streamline operational processes and expand market reach, enhancing efficiency and market competitiveness.

Ian Chapman-Banks, CEO of SQREEM, said, “SQREEM now offers the most comprehensive solution for advertising agencies and brands seeking to connect with youth audiences ethically and effectively. Our combination of tech and expertise will demonstrate how brands can precisely tailor their engagement with kids, teens and families while prioritising safety and trust.”

Meanwhile, Raja Kanniappan, CEO of TotallyAwesome, commented, “SQREEM’s acquisition of TotallyAwesome perfectly aligns with our strategy of curating high value audiences without cookies, drawing on our 9+ years of experience in marketing to kids, teens and families – and our more recent 18+ audience offering. With SQREEM’s cutting-edge AI technology solving the industry-wide challenge of activating against cookie-free intent-based audience segmentation, this union significantly strengthens both companies across all industry sectors.”

Singapore – SQREEM, a Singapore-based artificial intelligence company, has announced that it has acquired programmatic advertising platform Gamma SSP to augment the company’s plans to expand their services and clientele reach in Southeast Asia.

The acquisition entails that Gamma SSP will become a fully-owned subsidiary of SQREEM in the short term, with SSP eventually merging into SQREEM’s tech stack to unlock 97% of the world’s programmatic inventory and eventually expanding the offering to include digital out of home (DOOH) and connected TV (CTV) – forming a complete dynamic digital ecosystem. 

In addition, the acquisition will enable a global supply integration for SQREEM by combining its proprietary AI technology with Gamma’s integrations in the region and globally to bolster behavioral targeting solutions, at a landing page level, to brands and media agencies.

Gamma will still be led by its managing director, Matt Robinson, and the current management team. The combined entity plans to expand its headcount and geographical footprint by as much as 25% over the next year.

Ian Chapman-Banks, CEO of SQREEM Technologies explains that their AI technology allows them to convert online human behavior into anonymized data points to help out their clients reach the right people at the right place and time. 

“Gamma’s integrations will provide us a gateway to massively accelerate our access to any inventory around the world, and combining it with SQREEM’s AI will enable us to get even better and faster access towards delivering the first true cookie-free media buying platform. This will expand our offering as a one-stop solution that covers the entire gamut of programmatic advertising,” he said.

Founded in 2014, Gamma is a supply side platform (SSP) focused on representing Southeast Asian publishers, covering the key markets across the region. 

The company has already helped advertisers programmatically target audiences across an ecosystem of more than 1700 publishers, including major premium publishers in Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam and the Philippines. Gamma also has the ability to support connected TV ad spots and will be adding DOOH in the next 6 months.

“SQREEM’s strong presence across APAC and their experience in working with brands globally makes it an ideal match to further develop our SSP and we are thrilled about becoming part of such an exciting company,” said Robinson.

He added, “I believe the technology we offer is hugely complementary and that together, we can utilise both the Gamma and SQREEM platforms to realise their full potential.”

Classified as a ‘behavioral pattern data aggregator’, SQREEM collects, analyses, and creates a database of open data on the Internet using its own AI technology. The Singapore-based tech company provides data analysis and precision targeting services to more than 100 companies and government agencies across various industries.