Enterprise tag-management company Ensighten has acquired UK- and New York-based tag manager TagMan for an undisclosed sum, AdExchanger has learned. TagMan confirmed the deal Tuesday.
The tag-management space has heated up of late. BrightTag just hired Forrester analyst Joe Stanhope as its SVP of marketing, barely months after banking $27 million from Yahoo Japan. Conversely, on the marketing-platform side, Adobe acquired Satellite to bring dynamic tag-management capabilities to its digital marketing stack.
According to the CEO of a competing tag-management company, Qubit, tag managers represent a first-party data structure that breeds interoperability between multiple marketing systems and, in essence, acts as the data processor and “enabler” between them.
To put it simply, the tag manager allows a user or marketer to streamline all third-party tags placed on a site, as well as collect, manage and execute on data derived as a result of those tags.
TagMan works with a global customer base of 400, including such brands as Virgin America, Travelocity and Marriott. It calls its solution a tag-management, marketing-data and attribution platform.
Its acquirer, Ensighten, just closed a $40 million Series B round from Insight Venture Partners to expand development of its Agile Marketing Platform. Ensighten claims to work with customers that as a whole generate more than $1.9 trillion in revenues per year, including brands like Capital One, E-Trade and Sony Electronics.
In a previous interview with AdExchanger, Ensighten CEO Josh Manion said much of the secret to Ensighten’s success in a sea of competitors ranging from data-management platforms (DMPs) like BlueKai, just acquired by Oracle, to broad-based enterprise marketing technology platforms like Adobe is “because of our infrastructure and because of our system architecture” that scales well for enterprise users.
“We also consistently hear that our ability to handle all of the different customer touch points is a differentiator – so things like compiled mobile applications, Flash applications, airport kiosks, ATMs or any of these sorts of alternative devices,” he added.
Founded in 2007, TagMan has approximately 65 employees, according to its LinkedIn page. Founded in 2009, Ensighten’s headcount numbers around 115.
