Consent is becoming one of the most important requirements in online advertising – and InMobi wants to help publishers collect it.
On Wednesday, InMobi acquired Quantcast’s consent management platform, called Quantcast Choice, a CMP with one of the highest adoption rates across the ad tech ecosystem.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed, and no Quantcast employees are moving over to InMobi. Think of it as a strategic transfer of assets.
Now that Quantcast does more business directly with advertisers and agencies, owning a CMP makes less sense, and it’s been shopping its Choice product.
But InMobi, which works with hundreds of publishers, has been looking to bring a CMP into its bundled offering, said Kunal Nagpal, the company’s chief business officer.
A CMP is “absolutely essential” to ad tech, Nagpal added. “Not many companies do it, [and] even fewer do it well.”
The “ad tech” CMP
Quantcast took an early lead as a CMP provider.
It had a built-in network of sites that already used Quantcast for basic site and traffic analytics. The market was also wide open. Many ad tech companies were also reticent to invest in a CMP, because they didn’t want the accountability.
The tech responsible for collecting and managing consent is in a fraught position considering the increase in regulatory scrutiny.
But InMobi wants to play a more central role for publishers.
It will be up to InMobi to oversee hundreds of publishers that use the Choice CMP and to ensure that deceptive language isn’t being used to collect consent. Only consented data can be shared with SSPs, ad servers and other downstream partners. To do otherwise is a major GDPR no-no.
The CMP category formed mainly in response to GDPR and relies on technical specs developed by IAB Europe and IAB Tech Lab for serving pop-ups or other notifications to collect consent for targeted advertising.
Not all CMPs, however, are built for ad tech purposes.
OneTrust, for instance, is a CMP with an even larger footprint than Quantcast Choice (sorry, InMobi Choice) and a wider purview. It’s got modules for ethics, security and ESG governance, among other things.
It’s also a Google-recommended vendor, in part because it’s not solely focused on ad tech.
The IAB may have helped come up with the CMP category, Nagpal said, “but Google carries the weight in the ecosystem.”
A global CMP
Still, the CMP category doesn’t get much attention outside of Europe, despite consent serving as the underlying basis for processing personal information under data privacy regulations coming into effect across the globe, including in Canada and Brazil.
“The ad tech ecosystem needs a robust CMP that is globally useful,” Nagpal said.
As it was under Quantcast, the Choice CMP will remain free to use and also available to non-InMobi customers.
But Nagpal is in upsell mode.
“If you work with us and already and think you have a better option for a CMP,” he said, “I am going to try and convince you otherwise.”
