Cadent said it acquired ad tech company 4INFO on Thursday to help buyers to better allocate spend across channels and platforms as TV viewing fragments. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Cadent works with buyers and sellers to execute addressable and data-driven linear TV buys. It will gain access to OTT and CTV inventory through 4INFO’s integrations with streaming publishers.
“This is about cross channel expansion,” said Nick Troiano, CEO of Cadent. “4INFO has built the connections, workflow and capability to touch into any OTT and digital supply sources.”
Cadent will also integrate 4INFO’s patented device graph, which connects multiple devices within a household back to a persistent, deterministic ID. Cadent buyers will improve their ability to plan advanced TV buys against a single audience definition and manage for reach and frequency across devices and channels.
“The technology to do frequency capping exists, but it becomes enormously complicated across different providers and supply partners,” Troiano said. “An advertiser has to think about what kind of frequency the consumer is seeing on a set top box vs. an OTT environment on an iPad.”
Cadent says this capability will also allow it to serve and measure different ad experiences according to device or content type. For example, how does an on-demand OTT ad viewed on a mobile device perform compared to a linear TV ad for a live show, and what’s the right pricing and frequency for each?
“Different platforms have different nuances and engagement and that correlate to reach and frequency,” Troiano said.
Cadent has been buying CTV and OTT inventory for the past few years to extend advanced linear and addressable TV buys. It will gain more access to streaming inventory through the acquisition, but Cadent is not trying to compete with OTT walled gardens like Hulu and Roku, Troiano said.
“We’re not an OTT-first company,” he said. “We’re augmenting audiences across platforms and unifying back to whatever paradigm the advertiser is focused on.”
Cadent and 4INFO are no strangers to working together – the companies have partnered in recent years to extend Cadent’s reach into the OTT and mobile spaces – so much of the integration and workflow is already in place. All 30 of 4INFO’s employees will join Cadent’s team.
“This is really an extension to what we’ve been offering,” Troiano said. “It’s an acceleration to finding those audiences in other platforms, which is necessary for massive dollars to ultimately shift to advanced TV.
