Alliant is making good on its plans to build a modern, data-driven marketing platform through M&A.
The audience platform announced Monday that it’s acquiring data insights and analytics company AnalyticsIQ. Alliant declined to disclose the deal price.
The acquisition was funded by Alliant’s parent company, Inverness Graham, a private equity firm that specializes in buyouts. Inverness Graham acquired Alliant in November.
As part of the deal, AnalyticsIQ CEO Scarlett Shipp will take over the role of Alliant CEO. The current CEO, JoAnne Monfradi Dunn, will retire from day-to-day activities and take a seat on the company’s board of directors, where she will guide the transition process and provide strategic leadership for future potential acquisitions.
Alliant will integrate AnalyticsIQ’s audience modeling platform, which is based on user surveys and studies of health, wellness and cognitive psychology. This data helps the platform predict consumer behavior and future purchases, Shipp said, which is a natural complement to Alliant’s pool of data on past purchases.
The combined company will build a unified audience graph using AnalyticsIQ’s cognitive and behavioral signals and Alliant’s pool of transactional data and deterministic user IDs. But for the short-term, both companies will continue to operate as usual until the integration process is complete.
More data, more opportunity
“When Inverness Graham acquired Alliant, their investment thesis was that Alliant would be the platform to build on and add to with other robust, scalable data companies,” Monfradi Dunn said. The AnalyticsIQ acquisition is the first move toward delivering on that promise, she added.
Plus, Alliant gets a new CEO out of the deal. Which is no small consideration, Monfradi Dunn said, since Alliant had previously conducted a search for a new CEO that proved fruitless. However, she added, Shipp ticked all the boxes for what Alliant was looking for in a chief executive, just like AnalyticsIQ ticked all the boxes in terms of what Alliant was looking for in its first acquisition.
AnalyticsIQ’s focus on building audiences around wellness and psychological surveys should complement Alliant’s existing data set on billions of purchases and transactions, Shipp said. For example, AnalyticsIQ conducts surveys on sleep quality – which could inform campaign targeting for people looking for sleep aids or improve dayparting for targeting people who tend to stay up late with CTV ads.
By combining the two companies’ audience graphs and their machine-learning technology, Alliant can offer advertisers more scalability and more sophisticated audience modeling with greater processing capabilities, Shipp said.
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Demand for this type of probabilistic modeling is growing as deterministic data becomes scarce due to user opt-outs and platforms restrict the use of third-party cookies and device IDs.
Advertisers can match their target audiences against Alliant and AnalyticsIQ’s audiences using alternative IDs. For example, Alliant integrates The Trade Desk’s UID2 and LiveRamp’s RampID, among others, to facilitate audience matching against its pool of deterministic data, including email and IP addresses. It does not use third-party cookies for audience matching, Monfradi Dunn said.
Future additions
While there are plenty of goals on Alliant’s long-term road map, for the time being it will focus on the near-term growth opportunities that will come from combining the two companies’ portfolios and finding new ways to service clients, Shipp said.
And, as a longer-term goal, she said, Alliant will use its improved capabilities to pursue deeper integrations with advertising platforms.
As the companies come together, Alliant will add AnalyticsIQ’s roughly 60 employees to its current headcount of about 90. While the goal will be to grow that employee headcount over time, there may be some redundant roles that could be eliminated, Shipp said.
Alliant will prioritize adding more sales support, Shipp said. Cross-training both companies’ sales teams on a new unified go-to-market strategy will also be a major priority, as well as expanding relationships with existing customers.
And, naturally, Alliant is “exploring a lot of options” for launching an agentic AI solution that can make audience recommendations using its data set, Monfradi Dunn said, “but it’s just the beginning for us.”
Alliant likely isn’t done growing through acquisition, Monfradi Dunn said. “There’s not a ton of companies that make sense [for an acquisition], but there are a few.” However, she added, it’s too soon to call out any potential targets or areas of the business that need improvement while the consolidation of Alliant and AnalyticsIQ is still ongoing.
Shipp agreed with that assessment on acquisitions. “It’s TBD,” she said. “But just putting these two organizations together is going to add value for our customers.”
