FindWhat to Rebrand as Miva
Recent acquisitions will unite under the Miva umbrella.
FindWhat.com announced plans today to bring its various online marketing and e-commerce properties it has acquired over the last 18 months together under three divisions, all with the Miva brand name.
The FindWhat and Espotting networks will become Miva Media. This division will manage the company’s pay-per-click, pay-per-call and AdRevenue Xpress self-service product, as well as all private label initiatives. The company expects the re-branding to be complete by the end of June.
Miva’s e-commerce services, based on the Miva Merchant platform, will become Miva Small Business. Miva Merchant offers hosted merchant storefronts, payment processing, logistics management and professional services. Its desktop software business, formerly Comet Systems, will continue on as Miva Direct, offering private-branded toolbars and other search-related applications.
“We’re one large company, but we haven’t necessarily put that message out to the marketplace. We wanted to go out to the marketplace to find out what was going to best represent the global company we’d become,” said Craig Pisaris-Henderson, chairman and CEO of Miva.
Acquisitions of Miva, Espotting, and Comet Systems were all completed in 2004.
The company conducted several market research studies before choosing a new name for the consolidated company. Settling on a name that the company already owned was not the goal of the rebranding effort, according to Pisaris-Henderson.
“Our intention was not to come out with a new name which would be one that we already owned. At the end of the process, we noticed we had in-house a fantastic name that represented everything we wanted to represent to the marketplace, already in our portfolio in Miva,” he said.
The company’s NASDAQ ticker symbol will change to “MIVA” on June 13.
The new positioning will be announced in a marketing campaign covering the U.S., U.K., Germany, France, Italy and Spain. It includes print and online advertising as well as direct mail. In the U.S., a series of ads will appear in The New York Times and several trade publications beginning June 13. One highlights Miva vision of performance marketing, another explains why Web publishers should partner with an independent company like Miva.
“With Miva, online publishers have a choice of partnering with an independent company that remains ‘behind the scenes and focuses on helping them maximize their Internet real estate, rather than one that regularly vies for visitors and customers, but is in fact a competitor,” said CMO Seb Bishop. “Miva is a true strategic partner in every sense of the word and our marketing will serve to communicate that powerful message.”
FindWhat had faced tough times with dwindling profits and a lingering patent dispute with Yahoo The company scored a minor win in that case last month, and could settle it substantially by the end of June when a judge will decide how to handle the partial decisions made by a deadlocked jury in May.
