IDG Communications acquires Selling Simplified

B2B Marketing-as-a-Service platform Selling Simplified was acquired by business publisher IDG Communications. With the acquisition comes 160 million B2B records specific to the tech industry, as well as the company’s Demandcentr system, which monitors behavioral context and builds purchase intent around specific contacts.

Selling Simplified’s customers include agencies and B2B brands, such as Juniper Networks, Mediacom and Marketo.

IDG, which owns media brands like CIO and Macworld, will add Selling Simplified’s capabilities to a tech stack that it has built up through other acquisitions over the last 18 months. In this time, IDG acquired ABM platform Triblio, B2B intent data platform LeadSift and KickFire, a marketing data and intelligence solution.

Why we care. B2B marketing and sales channels have never been more fragmented and complicated. But with work-from-home and digital transformation at organizations, these contacts have also never been more digitized.

Read more: Targeting B2B personas in the right channels

For B2B marketers, the contextual breadcrumbs are there to discern intent, but they often sit within publishers who serve as important hubs for business intelligence and a sense of community.

About The Author

Chris Wood draws on over 15 years of reporting experience as a B2B editor and journalist. At DMN, he served as associate editor, offering original analysis on the evolving marketing tech landscape. He has interviewed leaders in tech and policy, from Canva CEO Melanie Perkins, to former Cisco CEO John Chambers, and Vivek Kundra, appointed by Barack Obama as the country’s first federal CIO. He is especially interested in how new technologies, including voice and blockchain, are disrupting the marketing world as we know it. In 2019, he moderated a panel on “innovation theater” at Fintech Inn, in Vilnius. In addition to his marketing-focused reporting in industry trades like Robotics Trends, Modern Brewery Age and AdNation News, Wood has also written for KIRKUS, and contributes fiction, criticism and poetry to several leading book blogs. He studied English at Fairfield University, and was born in Springfield, Massachusetts. He lives in New York.