Jan 5 -- Vio Worldwide, the digital supply chain company based in the U.K., has acquired from The Associated Press the assets of AP AdSEND, the U.S.-based news cooperative's online advertising delivery and management division. The two companies announced the acquisition today. AdSEND's one-stop, Web-based service allows advertisers and agencies to manage their creative content and deliver hundreds of thousands of ads to thousands of publications and printers. “AdSEND brings Vio huge U.S. distribution," said Vio Chief Executive, Rick Dool. "With our acclaimed solutions for automating the dispatch of ads by advertisers and their suppliers, as well as our sophisticated Ad Portals for publishers to receive ads, AdSEND is a perfect fit.” Vio Worldwide, a global leader in advertising fulfilment solutions, is part of Leo Capital PLC, a $400 million publicly-quoted company based in the U.K. Vio, which has operated in the United States for several years, has hundreds of publishers, advertising agencies, prepress houses and printers among its customers worldwide. Both Vio and the AP are major participants in the AdsML XML specification consortium, which enables different systems throughout the advertising supply chain to communicate efficiently with each other, in particular through the ebiz for media initiative of the American Association of Advertising Agencies. Alan Darling, Vio Executive Vice President, added: “For the first time, information in advertising insertion orders from media buyers’ booking systems will be automatically ingested into publishers’ advertising sales systems, avoiding costly errors and time-consuming reconciliation. Combining digital insertion orders with Vio’s leading ad fulfilment technology and the huge volume of advertising going through AdSEND, will deliver major efficiency gains to the whole print advertising industry.” "We see this asset sale as a great way to build on AdSEND's history by integrating services that simplify the entire print advertising chain, from ad-building through publication," said Joy Jones, vice president, business operations for AP's Global Newspaper Markets division. "We expect both publishers and advertisers to reap the benefits."