Marin: Sad fate FOR an Ad Management Platform

As SaaS Ad Management Platform Marin Software recently announced the launch of Marin One (the next generation of its cross-channel advertising platform) reminding us that they were still around, we took a look at their financials. Marin went public on 03/2013. In ten days, the stock climbed from $14 ($425M market cap) to $115. It would never go any higher. Fast forward 5 years later (with a 1-for-7 reverse split in 10/2017): the stock is now worth less than $6, losing 93% of market cap ($33M). The company has never generated any profit, revenue has decreased by 30% over the last 3 years ($75M in 2017 down from $109M in 2015), bleeds $30M a year, and does not appeal to analysts (we believe that there is no analyst covering the stock - we may be wrong though). This doesn't surprise us at all. We had twice the opportunity to work with Marin (SEM campaign management) and twice...the contract with them got cancelled. Even then, it was pretty obvious that working with such a platform was definitely not worth the price (they charge a few % points on spend as management fees). With a third company, we came across another vendor (Kenshoo) who met the same fate, and the contract got cancelled by management. This post is not meant to be disparaging to them or to any of their competitors but from a very operational prospective (always client-side, looking at $50M to $120M/yr in SEM budgets) such Ad Management Platforms have never proved helpful. They may be useful to some companies (or rather agencies?), and you may entertain the idea of using them to manage your hundreds of campaigns. That might be a good idea however our only advice would be to factor in the implementation cost i.e. set up fees, lower revenue (some of your campaigns will inevitably get rejected by the networks as you add marin URLs resources...they will take time to catch up with pre-implementation performance levels), and time to any revenue increase projection you may be working on. Multiply that cost by two while you're at it as you might end up disappointed and decide to kill the deal. For more info on Marin Software (reviews and competitors Acquisio, Kenshoo, etc), take a look here.