Neustar’s $450 million deal to acquire MarketShare Partners, announced Thursday, brings together two major digital marketing measurement players that will “help CMOs justify their existence to the CFO,” said Neustar CMO Lisa Joy Rosner.
The purchase price is $390 million once tax considerations are factored out of the deal, the companies said. Read the press release.
The deal is Neustar’s third notable acquisition in the marketing analytics space. The company bought analytics firm TargusInfo in 2011 for $650 million, and Aggregate Knowledge in 2013 for approximately $119 million.
Neustar and MarketShare has been partnering since July 2014.
“MarketShare gives us the opportunity to provide CMOs with everything they need to be a truly data-driven organization – which is particularly relevant at this time of year when we’re all in he middle of budgeting,” Rosner said.
It’s also part of an effort to move away from the point solutions choking the LUMAscape, said MarketShare co-CEO Wes Nichols.
“There are a lot of point solutions out there doing bits and pieces and there will continue to be,” he said. “But the greatest value for the executives at multinationals and large companies is the ability to convert data into knowledge – actionable knowledge. The last thing our industry needs is further obfuscation around what’s driving revenue.”
Although Neustar itself was “known as a company that had a lot of point solutions,” said Neustar CFO and SVP Paul S. Lalljie during the company’s Q3 earnings call, the goal is to become “a full workflow solution.”
MarketShare’s other CEO, Jon Vein, likened the Neustar/MarketShare hookup to Google Earth for the marketing function – a tool that provides a bird’s eye view for the C-suite and a street-level view in terms of execution.
“Right now, those approaches are disaggregated – they don’t talk to each other and there are different sets of KPIs,” Vein said.
Marketing services is become more of a sweet spot for Neustar, especially in light of the fact that its long-held government contract for phone number portability – which is currently up for renewal and forms a large portion of Neustar’s revenue – will likely be awarded to Swedish company Ericsson.
“We’ve been focusing on what we call information services, building authoritative data about people, places and things and finding use cases for using that data,” said Neustar SVP of information services Brian Foster. “It’s been a huge focus for us both organically and inorganically with the acquisitions we’ve done over the last few years.”
The deal will also make Neustar more competitive against the big guys, Rosner said.
“We already compete with some pretty large companies, but this gives us an advantage over them that is unparallelled,” she said. “Take Adobe, for example. They can’t come close to this combination, especially when you think about bridging online and offline.”
MarketShare is already onboarding Neustar’s data to their partners. The two will begin to build consolidated, integrated products over the coming year, Foster said.
Marketing services accounted for $41.1 million of Neustar’s total revenue $261.7 million in Q3 2015 – a 10% year over year increase for that unit.
MarketShare was advised on the deal by Morgan Stanley and LUMA Partners.
