Sprout Announces Partnership with Hearst Digital Media

SAN FRANCISCO, March 6, 2012 PRNewswire/ -- Sprout, the leading global platform for mobile brand advertising, today announced its partnership with Hearst Digital Media, a unit of Hearst Magazines. The partnership establishes Sprout as the mobile and tablet rich-media ad creation platform for Hearst's digital portfolio, including brands like Marie Claire, Good Housekeeping, Cosmopolitan and Seventeen.

Sprout offers a self-service platform that allows clients to create, manage, and optimize display advertising on smart-devices including phones, tablets, game platforms, and TVs.  Hearst will use the Sprout platform to develop high-engagement HTML5 ad units for their brand advertisers to run on its mobile optimized websites.

Laura Schooling, Hearst Digital Media's executive director of marketing services, said, "Sprout's technology will better enable us to create deeply engaging advertising experiences for our clients across the mobile and tablet web. With a comprehensive suite of HTML5 applications, we can develop solutions that tap into the inherent functionality of each device—tailoring solutions to consumer interests and behaviors."

Carnet Williams, VP of Sprout, said, "We are excited Sprout will be Hearst's mobile ad creation technology partner, and look forward to enabling Hearst's creative team to create engaging ads for consumers that reflect the quality of the world class editorial that defines Hearst brands.  Hearst and Sprout share a mutual commitment to innovation and creativity, and we look forward to growing our partnership."

About Sprout

Sprout, an InMobi company, is the leading global platform for mobile brand advertising. The cloud-based tool enables designers, creative agencies and brands to build mobile rich media ad units to run across Android, iOS and the mobile web. The drag and drop interface requires no knowledge of code and the output is high performance HTML5 creative. Designers using the tool can incorporate interactivity and increase engagement with animation, sound and video. Sprout is compatible with most major mobile ad networks and hundreds of premium mobile publishers.

Sprout is a wholly owned subsidiary of InMobi. Venture-backed by investors including SoftBank, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sherpalo Ventures, InMobi has offices in Bangalore, Johannesburg, London, Nairobi, New York, Paris, San Francisco, Seoul, Singapore and Tokyo.

To learn more, please visit www.sproutinc.com.

About Hearst Digital Media

Launched in March 2006, Hearst Digital Media, a unit of Hearst Magazines, is dedicated to creating and implementing the digital strategy for Hearst's magazine brands and other sites, which serve the company's consumer audience. The unit oversees more than 28 websites and 14 mobile sites for brands such as Cosmopolitan, ELLE, ELLE DECOR, Esquire, Good Housekeeping, Marie Claire, Popular Mechanics, Road & Track and Seventeen, as well as digital-only sites such as Delish.com, a food site in partnership with MSN; and RealBeauty.com. Hearst Magazines has published more than 150 applications and digital editions for the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch, as well as the Android platform. In addition, the company includes iCrossing, a global digital marketing agency.

Media Contacts
For Sprout: Jill Ivey, Hotwire PR | 215.806.2951| [email protected]
For Hearst: Michael Volpatt, Larkin/Volpatt Communications | 415.994.8864 | [email protected]

SOURCE Sprout