Comcast May Buy Visible World; Local Programmatic Changing Measurement

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Comcast Shops For Advanced TV

Comcast is in talks to buy TV ad-targeting firm Visible World, according to The Wall Street Journal’s sources. Visible World, parent company to AudienceXpress, has raised $33 million to date. “One of Visible World’s biggest strengths, marketing executives say, is its technology that allows advertisers to simply and inexpensively create custom versions of TV commercials that are targeted to cable viewers,” according the the Journal article, co-authored by Shalini Ramachandran and Mike Shields. “For example, advertisers can change creative content in commercials such as shifting offers or images based on things such as household data or even weather in a particular market.” The deal would echo Comcast’s $320 million FreeWheel acquisition last year, though sources say the deal is not yet imminent. Read on.

Full-Funnel Makeover

In an interview with Street Fight, Simplifi boss Frost Prioleau talks about how localized programmatic advertising is changing the measurement game. “The definition of full-funnel attribution models is expanding,” Prioleau said. “Not only are companies able to track attribution from other digital advertising or conversion to online, but we’re also starting to see attribution from purchases offline through CRM data linking and also through physical visits to a store by tracking beacons or GPS location. … It used to be full-funnel was just online activity. Now we’re seeing full-funnel include offline activity as well.” Simplifi offers a programmatic ad platform specializing in localized marketing.

Mmmm, Beacons

Mobile analytics firm Kochava snapped up InferSystems to enhance its mobile ad optimization chops. InferSystem is a predictive analytics software company, and Kochava will use its tech to distill campaign data from ad networks and publishers. “Moving forward, measurement has to include optimization,” Kochava CEO Charles Manning told TechCrunch. “Because if you don’t, you’re not taking into account all the data you’re collecting.” Read the release.

Visa Commerce

Visa unveiled plans to buy TrialPay, an ecommerce payments platform that also deals in advertising. Visa is eager to strengthen its ties with merchants and provide them with the data. “TrialPay will strengthen our loyalty and offers platform, which we expect to become a strategic and competitive differentiator that can help merchants build customer loyalty and increase sales in both the digital and physical retail environments,” commented Ramon Martin, Visa SVP of merchant sales and solutions, in a press release.

Programmatic + Native

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Endless Antitrust; Third-Party Sellers Lose Their Party Invites

Choicestream VP Sabine Cummins chats about the programmatic native opportunity in an interview with Ad Ops Online. “It enables the configuration of advertiser content with publisher content to occur instantaneously,” she said. “It also allows brands to target audiences and fine-tune inventory purchase decisions based on first and third-party data sources.” What’s next for programmatic native? “I believe that video ad formats will be included in the inventory available, as more sites create their content around snackable videos,” Cummins predicts. Read the interview.

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