Ad tech giant InMarket today announced the acquisition of assets from location intelligence firm NinthDecimal for an undisclosed sum. This brings together a complementary portfolio of performance marketing technology — particularly around greater precision in campaign-targeting and attribution.
The deal specifically brings better location-targeting and tracking to InMarket’s arsenal. NinthDecimal is a longtime leader in location intelligence, especially around targeting and attributing ad campaigns that drive offline local foot traffic. Those in the local media industry know this as online-to-offline (O2O) marketing.
This will come together as NinthDecimal’s location intelligence technology is infused with InMarket’s AdTech suite. The former includes NinthDecimal’s GeoLink and Location Conversion Index (LCI), while the latter includes a media SaaS platform, insights as a service (IaaS) and data as a service (DaaS).
As for operational scale, the combined platform will be supported by more than two dozen patents, and available through more than 550 patents. Collectively, the firms have served more than 2,000 brands, agencies, publishers and ad tech players. The deal also brings InMarket’s annual revenue to $100+ million.
“Both teams share the same culture and vision of creating business growth for marketers through greater scale, flexibility & more channels,” Ninth Decimal CEO Mike Fordyce told Localogy Insider. “The combination of NinthDecimal’s and InMarket’s powerful solutions creates the ultimate marketing platform in the industry. With $100M in revenue and 200 team members, I’m really excited at what lies ahead for the new InMarket.”
Zooming In
Drilling down into particulars, Fordyce — who now transitions to InMarket Chief Business officer — provided point-by-point details about how the platforms come together, which we’ve reproduced below:
Greater Scale, Flexibility & Channels
Omni-Channel Customer Journey – NinthDecimal’s strengths in connecting online and offline combined with InMarket’s strengths in real-time location advertising and transactional data creates a comprehensive offering across the customer journey from audience selection to real-time activation to attribution and analytics.
Performance, Precision, and Quality at Scale – InMarket’s 1st party SDK data combined with NinthDecimal’s 100% SDK scale delivers unrivaled accuracy and access across over 100M permission-based consumers.
Brand Growth Made Easy – the combined solutions available as white-glove managed service, software-as-a-service or data-as-a-service.
Enhanced Functionality & Capabilities
More Consumer Moments: InMarket’s proprietary Moments offering combined with NinthDecimal’s Moments delivers relevant engagement opportunities across the path to purchase – from consideration at home to shopping in-store to holding product in-hand.
Measure Visits and Sales: NinthDecimal’s leading foot traffic attribution combined with InMarket’s first party transaction data will measure marketing effectiveness across the full path to purchase.
Powered by a Unified Platform: NinthDecimal’s “AIM” marketing platform combined with InMarket’s self-service GeoLink location platform will create an integrated approach across audiences, activation, attribution and analytics.
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Zooming Out
One reason this is all-important for InMarket is the trend towards consolidating ad tech. This is driven by legislative and private-sector privacy measures, which compel ad tech companies to have better first-party data. That’s mostly due to the fact that new privacy measures focus on the use of third-party data.
On top of that trend, there’s ongoing movement in the brand marketing world towards “in-housing.” This is when brands eschew ad agencies (and their fees), which creates greater demand for the ad tech platforms they can use internally. These brands generally want fewer vendors that are more holistic.
Add all this up with a dash of Covid-pressured contraction, and the result is continued consolidation in ad tech. This is something we’ve predicted (pre-Covid) that continues to play out. For InMarket specifically, this is its second acquisition in the past year, following the late 2019 acquisition of ThinkNear from Telenav.
Beyond those macro factors — and back to NinthDecimal specifically — InMarket will now have better ability to offer foot-traffic measurement to its brand advertisers. This isn’t as relevant in the currently locked-down brick & mortar environment, but InMarket is eyeing longer-term positioning for local commerce’s return.
