Claritas acquired the CRM and identity company AcquireWeb on Tuesday, the third in a yearlong buying spree as Claritas revamps its traditional audience segment business for real-time, data-driven media.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Claritas will gain 20-30 AcquireWeb employees.
In the past year Claritas has also added Geoscape, a multicultural audience targeting company, and Barometric, a media measurement startup. With the addition of AcquireWeb, Claritas is ready to ramp up the online media business, said CEO Mike Nazzaro.
“Between Barometric and AcquireWeb, we now have the audience creation, optimization and measurement pieces for us to build one of the industry’s larger identity graphs,” Nazzaro said.
The co-founders of Nielsen Catalina Solutions, including the CEO, COO and CRO, spun Claritas out of Nielsen three years ago, with backing from the private equity firm Carlyle Group. NCS had just orchestrated an ad tech turnaround, transitioning its in-store sales data – Catalina is the top manufacturer of the machines that print receipts – to the programmatic ecosystem for use in targeting and attribution.
The former NCS team wants to run a similar playbook with Claritas, previously a Nielsen business that segments households into certain consumer categories, such as empty nesters or young, well-educated people living in satellite cities.
Claritas works directly with brands and some agencies to enhance their CRM data. By adding Claritas’ consumer data, for instance, a brand could expand its addressable audience, which is particularly important for CPGs and other companies without much first-party data. Claritas also licenses data directly to major platform resellers such as Oracle, LiveRamp and The Trade Desk.
The new data-driven advertising revenue is marginal compared to the longstanding audience syndication business from its Nielsen days, but Nazzaro said it’s growing as a percent of overall revenue and will accelerate moving forward.
The standalone businesses of AcquireWeb, Barometric and Geoscape will eventually be combined into a single Claritas product suite, he said. “Our vision is to integrate them and form one very compelling data lake and identity graph that fuels lots of products.”
