Contact: Scott Denne
LiveRamp is set to start its annual RampUp conference for the second time under Acxiom’s ownership. That purchase is proving to be immensely successful and in need of a follow-up. Acxiom bought LiveRamp in May 2014, and the target now generates in a quarter what it posted in the entire year leading up to its sale. It has also brought Acxiom meaningful partnerships with a wide swath of the ad-tech ecosystem, something it had struggled with earlier.
Part of the reason for LiveRamp’s success to date is scarcity. There are few other companies that provide the ability to convert customer identity (email addresses, in LiveRamp’s case) into cookies. There’s a growing demand from advertisers to do this as they increasingly look to first-party data to plan and launch digital advertising campaigns. That’s part of a larger trend of advertisers synchronizing and optimizing media spending across channels amid a media landscape that’s shifting rapidly as audiences transition their time to digital (social, mobile, connected TV and other IP-enabled channels). For advertisers to manage and measure this, they’ll need data that connects and links the disparate pieces.
Businesses with a history in legacy media and those that smell an opportunity to enter the media and marketing arena are scooping up assets to help solve this problem. In the former category sits Nielsen, the media measurement giant that nabbed eXelate last March, adding a data exchange and audience management platform to enable Nielsen to provide a digital bridge to link its media measurement business with retail purchase tracking. In the latter category, Oracle made itself into a substantial player through multiple deals, including its recent reach for AddThis.
Linking email and cookies gave Acxiom a piece of the overall data puzzle; however, its competitors are angling to be the de facto data provider for the entire marketing and advertising ecosystem, not just a few select applications. And while there’s a ways to go before the winner is crowned, there is a sense of urgency to expand these data sets. The more diverse data that a vendor can co-mingle on a server, the more accuracy and reach it has. So scale will beget scale in this market. Acxiom has begun to expand its offering into television, with an assist from the tuck-in of Allant Group’s TV unit. To keep pace with both rivals and the needs of marketers, the company will have to continue to explore emerging segments such as cross-device identity matching (it has several partnerships there) and mobile location data.
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