In the deal announced on Monday, TransUnion said it is acquiring the 11-year-old company, which started as BrightTag, to advance its ability to offer consumer data and identity information to marketers.
Signal’s core offering was tag management, a way of managing ad trackers from multiple vendors all together. It has branched out to support first-party audience data for advertisers.
Deal terms were not disclosed.
“People-based marketing and more personalised marketing approaches and tactics start to really demonstrate the intersection in the synergies between both of our offerings,” Weinstein says in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“We can start to offer our customers, I think, a really compelling and synergistic approach.”
“Consumers and the market can be very confident in their ability to leverage that data in compliant ways.”
Just announced: TransUnion acquires Signal! Learn more in our press release. https://t.co/FF9P6VyJbA pic.twitter.com/efjEvPdVAM
— Signal (@Signal) August 17, 2020
In recent years, TransUnion has been extending from just supplying credit check data to leveraging consumer purchase and other data for the purposes of ad targeting.
Privacy regulations and new limits on ad-tracking are compelling companies to gain and better-leverage information supplied by customers in an opt-in fashion, the trend in people-based marketing.
Last year, TransUnion invested in Tru Optik, a firm enabling ad targeting and measurement for OTT TV.
“With consumer privacy (regulation) and third party cookie challenges … it’s just so critically at the front and center for marketers today to have a really good understanding themselves, in the first party, of how their consumers and customers are leveraging their assets,” Weinstein says.
Credit Score Giant TransUnion Making Moves in Media Sector, Matt Spiegel explains
“Signal was an absolute pioneer in that space, in enabling our clients to onboard their customer data, such that we could post what we would call a ‘brand graph’,” she adds.
“When you combine our real-time data collection – meaning, take our data collection, our original tag business, but evolved into real digital and real time data collection across all owned and operated properties of our clients…
“We have the ability to dynamically update a first-party graph with those actions, intent signals, if you will.
“Our ability to dynamically update that graph and allow our clients to segment their customers, based on those real time actions and behaviours and identify them, has become a core part of our differentiated offering.”
She hopes the TransUnion acquisition will lead to great outcomes.
“You take their mass footprint and scale of data and insights, and you combine that to some of the early pioneering approaches of the marketing technology that Signal has – the-real time data collection and dynamic updating of that customer understanding,” she says…
“And I hope and expect that that combination becomes truly a game changing opportunity for our clients and many other potential clients to leverage both of those aspects
“(They) get kind of the best of both, which is pretty compelling. “
]]>Designed to help SMG clients with their content marketing efforts, Content@Scale gives quick access to licensed content produced by more than 36 publishers and 135 content contributors, including CBSi, Kiplinger, Mode, Popsugar and AOL, as well as owned content from brand websites, YouTube videos, tweets and Facebook posts.
“It gives brands the ability to associate with quality content … that’s relevant to what [they] care about and to what consumers are talking about and publish that content into paid ads,” says Lisa Weinstein, SMG’s president of global digital, data and analytics. “That really is the value proposition of Content@Scale.”
The program first launched at CES in 2014. Now there are more than 350,000 searchable articles, images and videos in the database, which brands can incorporate into ad units and other types of communications.
At launch, the focus was on display as a distribution channel for content, via a partnership with Flite. Now, working through SMG’s partner Innovid, brands can transform their pre-roll video into interactive and personalized experiences by tapping into the Content@Scale database. And via Nativo, they can insert their content into native formats in publisher streams.
We interviewed Weinstein earlier this month at SMG’s headquarters in Chicago.
]]>The evolution of programmatic buying inside agencies is similar to the growth of digital departments, which had previously been siloed, but are now more integrated inside agencies, she says. SMG counts 8000 employees globally who can leverage data and technology and that’s why it makes sense to weave programmatic buying back into the core of the business inside the agency.
“It is our business today. It’s not some separate unit. It’s people leveraging technology,” she says. This shift mirrors how programmatic buying itself has become widespread. Any inventory source that can be accessed through technology in an automated fashion is fair game for programmatic buying, so that includes display, mobile, video, social and even search, Weinstein says.
]]>
SMG’s new Content@Scale CMS, launched this week, ingests text articles and images from Ahalogy, Demand Media, Glam Media, Forbes, Martha Stewart Omnimedia, Parade, Rodale Inc. and Time, Inc, all of whom are happy to license the materials for re-use by brands anywhere.
“Traditional display campaigns were subject to the constraints of what could be placed within that (ad) unit for consumer to engage with,” SMG’s global digital, data and analytics president Lisa Weinstein tells Beet.TV.
“Can it only live with the publisher of the content? No. The truth is, Forbes content could end up running on any other publisher. That was something to be worked through.”
Gaining publishers’ agreement to turn their pages in to ads is certainly different. But that’s the place media are at in 2014.
In principle, Content@Scale, powered by Flite, sounds a little like a smaller version of NewsCred, the content marketing startup whose platform lets brands licence articles from around the world for marketing purposes.
Weinstein says her system is “real-time” but is best at giving marketers “evergreen” content: “If they created it yesterday or last month, it could have equal relevance to something a brand wants to associate with today.” It’s not clear if that means publishers are offering only archive content to marketers.
Content@Scale plans to include video for re-use later this year before expanding out of North America toward the end of the year.
]]>