Innocean Acquires Performance Marketing Company 'Deeppurple'

CEO Choi Hyuk-su of The Purple (left) and CEO Lee Yong-woo of Innocean (right) attended the acquisition contract signing ceremony.

[Asia Economy Reporter Lim Chun-han] Innocean Worldwide announced on the 10th that it has signed an acquisition agreement with ‘Deeppurple,’ a digital performance marketing specialist company. This is the first corporate acquisition since CEO Lee Yong-woo took office, and Innocean plans to further accelerate digital transformation through this move.

Founded in 2011, Deeppurple is a company specializing in performance marketing, a type of digital marketing, in South Korea. It has differentiated competitiveness in search marketing and digital content strategy by handling search ads (SA) and banner ads (DA) services across various sectors such as finance, shopping, travel, and education.

Performance marketing is a form of digital marketing that focuses on understanding and improving the consumer journey toward specific outcomes (purchase, subscription) based on data. By analyzing the stage from ad exposure to inflow to the company’s website, it continuously improves ad exposure methods and messaging by analyzing which ads attract more interest.

Innocean stated that performance marketing can directly increase customer sales, including revenue, app and web traffic, and app downloads. It also explained that the acquisition background lies in the growing corporate demand for performance marketing, as it enables customer sales linkage analysis and maximization of media efficiency.

In fact, last year, the proportion of digital advertising in total advertising increased by 13% compared to the previous year, reaching 5.7106 trillion KRW. This accounts for 47.6% of the total advertising market share, the highest ever. Among this, mobile advertising grew by 17.5% year-on-year to 3.8558 trillion KRW. The PC advertising market also grew by 4.7% year-on-year to 1.8548 trillion KRW, with exposure-type ads increasing by 10.5% due to the impact of remote work and online classes.

With this acquisition of Deeppurple, Innocean will be able to secure execution capabilities and areas for digital campaigns. Accordingly, it expects to enhance digital business profitability through opportunities to expand new advertisers via integrated digital marketing, improve performance, and increase cost efficiency.

CEO Lee said, “The acquisition of Deeppurple is part of Innocean’s pursuit of digital transformation,” adding, “We will continue to strengthen our business capabilities by actively discovering new growth engines and proactively responding to changes in the market environment through ongoing organizational improvements.”