Programmatic email platform LiveIntent has acquired Mojn, a Copenhagen-based data onboarding company, following LiveIntent’s recent acquisition of the European recommendation engine AVARI. Terms were undisclosed.
All 12 of Mojn’s employees, a majority of whom are data scientists, will join LiveIntent, said Matt Keiser, LiveIntent’s founder and CEO.
The acquisition will support LiveIntent’s international expansion, an effort underway since August when its US-based president, Dave Hendricks, relocated to the UK to serve as a European managing director.
The deal will also fuel further product development as LiveIntent builds out a new business division led by its new president of intent, Shiven Ramji, former head of global shopper and marketing insights at Amazon.
“Mojn’s technology will allow us to map intent without the use of cookies to email opens across our platform, whether the email open happens on a mobile device or on desktop,” Keiser said. “Sixty-one percent of LiveIntent’s 117 million unique monthly users happen on mobile and we see the trend continuing in that direction.”
Mojn builds a stronger connection between LiveIntent and DSPs and cross-device systems such as MediaMath, Tapad, Drawbridge and Criteo, in an effort to map persistent IDs on mobile to media on its own platform, Keiser noted, a new capability for the company.
Like Facebook, Oracle, Criteo, Google and Verizon/AOL, LiveIntent claims to enable people-based marketing – in other words it is able to verify identities based on logged-in (or opted in) personas to pinpoint marketing messages.
“We’re focused on building out products for brands that bring what we call ‘evergreen’ demand,” said Keiser. “The reason why a company like Criteo has been so successful is because Marriott never wakes up and says, ‘I don’t want to fill more rooms.’ We’re focused on being the A9 and Criteo of email while offering more of a full stack.”
By “full stack,” Keiser’s referring to new tools coming down the pike focused on “Marketing To Intent,” the business division led by Shiven. These tools will focus on helping brands and publishers do more with their deidentified customer data.
LiveIntent’s focus, thus far, has been deals it cuts directly with publishers like the New York Times and Washington Post, as well as brands like Marriott, Kraft and Walmart, to programmatically serve ads in email newsletters consumers have already opted into.
Keiser sees more opportunity to take LiveIntent’s people-based model and apply it to new use cases. For instance, a company like Square maintains relationships with many small to midsize merchants, many of whom lack reach with regard to their own email lists.
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LiveIntent could let merchants match their customer lists with its publisher network for audience extension, Keiser claimed.
“Fraud is virtually nonexistent with our platform and that’s because we know what throat to choke on every impression,” Keiser said. “We’re never more than one hop and a skip away from the publisher, DSP or advertiser. We’ve promised our publisher customers we can do competitive blocking and I wouldn’t want to work with a partner if it meant I couldn’t block an ad for my own customer.”
