Industry Reaction To GSI Commerce Acquisition Of ClearSaleing

Below is a sample of industry reaction to yesterday’s acquisition of attribution analytics company ClearSaleing by e-Commerce infrastructure and services company GSI Commerce. Read the release.

Justin Evans, SVP Audience Insights, Collective

GSI’s move into the advertising analytics arena emphasizes the trend among advertisers to take advantage of increasingly sophisticated ROI metrics. As data sources across online and offline become integrated, and as the media industry creates comparable impressions or GRPs across platforms, we approach a world of real accountability. That means a vastly more efficient use of resources; and success for consumer, marketer, media company—and our economy as a whole. Analytics are the lynchpin to this trend.

Kevin Lee, CEO, Didit

GSI’s acquisition of ClearSaleing underscores the importance for marketers and agencies of understanding the relative value of all the media touchpoints as those touchpoints contribute to a sale. Equally, or perhaps even more important, marketers must have an understanding of the marginal elasticity of each media channel in order to properly escalate or cut budgets by channel or specific vendor. The holy grail of media automation, based on microeconomics, is to graduate beyond attribution into understanding value of discrete media assets at the margin. It has long been our goal at DidIt to be media agnostic, deploying client budgets where those budgets work hardest. To do so, we’ve built our technology to measure and react to interaction effects between online media. Will this form of media mix modeling also migrate into offline media as it too becomes more automated? I certainly hope so. Time will tell.

Mike Seiman, CEO, CPX

In today’s digital landscape, agencies seem to be acquiring company after company in order to better manage their digital spend and extend their clients’ ultimate ROI. While many acquisitions prove fruitful in the data and analytics area, none is more refreshing to see then a play to enhance the attribution of display efforts. CPX uses many models to compare control groups to audience targeting to prove the effectiveness of display, but when an agency can create the ability to see that effectiveness across all their display buying, it is truly a win for all of us. This is just the kind of platform/operating system based thinking that we see as essential for the efficient consolidation of a way-to-crowded landscape.

Jeff Zwelling, CEO, Convertro

This acquisition by GSI emphasizes the fundamental importance of multi-attribution to the marketing efforts of e-commerce clients and, by extension, validates our strong belief that it is important to devote attention to the top of the marketing funnel rather than simply harvesting brand-generated results from the bottom. Furthermore, it reflects the ongoing paradigm shift of media buying from being an art based on gut instinct to a numbers-driven science. We believe that GSI’s acquisition represents the beginning of widespread acceptance of multi-attribution principles and data-driven marketing decisions, a trend that will have long-term benefits to Convertro and our clients.

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