Neustar’s marketing services revenue grew 23% to $51.1 million YoY in the fourth quarter, and climbed 16% to $170.4 million for the full year 2015.
It’s a small but increasingly important part of Neustar’s overall business (which also includes information services and security services). According to CEO Lisa Hook the total business brought in $1.05 billion in revenue in 2015, which represented 9% growth YOY.
The growth of areas like marketing services is particularly important, since last spring Neustar lost its NPAC (national portability administration center) contract to supply number portability services in the US, when competitor Ericsson poached the contract.
Neustar has invested heavily in marketing services; it spent about $758.3 million on acquisitions last year, one of which was the $450 million transaction for marketing analytics platform MarketShare, which closed in December.
“MarketShare was our largest acquisition and it took a huge amount of planning and execution to get there,” Hook said during the company’s Q4 earnings call on Thursday.
Although it’s still early days in the integration process, Hook said Neustar has a strong playbook for integrations and a solid due diligence process, so she doesn’t foresee any surprises.
Neustar claims it is winning more RFPs for its marketing services business, thanks mainly to its customer intelligence and activation products.
“We offer CMOs a comprehensive marketing suite that helps optimize their media spend, deliver relevant offers and measure the performance of these activities,” Hook said. “Clients consistently see sales lift from their marketing expenditures.”
While Neustar is still building out its measurement capabilities, CFO Paul Lalljie claimed Neustar’s marketing hub is differentiated because its platform is more focused on optimizing marketing spend and dollar allocation.
This capability, he claimed, allows CMOs to link “omnichannel” marketing investments to business metrics like sales and profitability, which was among MarketShare’s rallying cries when a standalone company.
Lalljie also mentioned Neustar’s focus on integrating new data attributes to expand campaign activations, including mobile ad IDs, and political affiliation/TV viewership data.
