Cyber Monday may be done, but the ad tech deal-making just won’t quit.
On Wednesday, Experian joined the ad tech consolidation parade with its acquisition of Audigent, a startup DMP and curation vendor. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
It’s been a busy few months in the ad tech sector.
The Audigent deal follows Zeta Global’s recent acquisition of LiveIntent, Mediaocean snapping up Innovid and Viant’s purchase of IRIS.TV.
Up and down the chain
Supply-chain consolidation has been a priority for both Experian and Audigent for some time, so it’s hardly surprising to see Audigent merge its point solution with a larger identity data company.
For instance, in June, Experian launched its own third-party onboarding solution using Tapad, the identity graph it acquired in 2020, as a way to help advertiser clients and publisher partners to cut out a middleman vendor.
At the time, Scott Kozub, VP of product at Experian Marketing Services, told AdExchanger the idea was inspired by The Trade Desk on the buy side and by large CTV publishers, including DirecTV, NBCUniversal and Samsung Ads. They were eager to continue using Experian’s data without requiring another vendor (which is to say LiveRamp) to act as an ID matching table.
But why Audigent?
With its Tapad acquisition, Experian was able to bring its wealth of historical offline data, including store consumption and household address info, to the world of online advertising IDs.
But Tapad was originally built as an identity graph business, which requires a great deal of third-party tracking info – and that’s becoming increasingly less feasible.
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“The old way of having a deterministic identifier that gets hosted in a matching table is going to lose fidelity,” Drew Stein, Audigent’s founder and CEO, told AdExchanger earlier this year.
Put another way, companies like Experian will no longer host third parties at their match tables. Instead, they’ll have data management platforms like Audigent join the family.
Happy holidays to ad tech indeed.
