What’s better than first-party shopper data? First-party shopper data paired with predictive analytics.
That’s the thinking behind Adroit Digital’s acquisition of Arcametrics, a small North Carolina-based company whose technology uses predictive modeling to create lookalike audiences based on high-quality customers.
Adroit declined to share details of the deal, including price, although company president Jacob Ross said current Arcametrics employees will join the Adroit team in “various technology roles.” Adroit plans to assimilate the Arcametrics brand into its own.
After being acquired by DSP MediaMath back in 2010, Adroit (known at the time as Adroit Interactive) was relaunched in 2013 as Adroit Digital based on the Advertising Decisioning Solutions (ADS) technology MediaMath had previously bought from Akamai. The result was a shared data co-op that Ross refers to as “Adroit’s crown jewel.”
Dubbed the Data Collective, Adroit’s shared data co-op is comprised of about 400 million customer profiles and tracks roughly 100 million unique purchasers each month, including transactional data related to in-market consumer behavior such as browsing, adding items to a cart and actual purchases. That data is then shared in an open model among 250 large-scale e-commerce marketers.
And that, Ross said, is where Arcametrics comes in.
“In the coming year, Adroit will be working aggressively to build out our capabilities to provide marketers with the ability to reach audiences both in performance media and beyond,” he said. “What made Arcametrics such a fantastic company to bring into the Adroit family is their strong capabilities around true data science and data engineering.”
Arcametrics will help power the Data Collective, which in turn will help power Adroit’s newly launched Marketing Collective, an expanded version of the co-op that enables members to tap into Adroit’s shared shopper data, as well as its Media Collective, what Ross called a “proprietary mix of large-scale exchange integrations, marketplace access to inventory and direct deals.”
Scale is also a big motivating factor here, Ross said.
“Our clients are looking for a better way to work together to compete in an increasingly competitive global market,” he said. “There should be an alternative to working in closed systems… [and] we know from extensive experience that past commerce behavior is the best predictor of future commerce behavior. This is best done at scale.”
According to Ross, the majority of Adroit clients are already participating in the collective at some level. Adroit also plans to “work very closely” with its parent company, MediaMath, Ross said, and roll out solutions “in the short term to T1 clients so they can benefit from Adroit’s solution.”
