CHICAGO — With its sale l to TransUnion, Signal CEO Lisa Weinstein hopes the pair-up can be a “game-changer”.
In the deal announced on Monday, TransUnion said it is acquiring the 11-year-old company, which started as BrightTag, to advance its ability to offer consumer data and identity information to marketers.
Signal’s core offering was tag management, a way of managing ad trackers from multiple vendors all together. It has branched out to support first-party audience data for advertisers.
Deal terms were not disclosed.
Identity graph
“People-based marketing and more personalised marketing approaches and tactics start to really demonstrate the intersection in the synergies between both of our offerings,” Weinstein says in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“We can start to offer our customers, I think, a really compelling and synergistic approach.”
“Consumers and the market can be very confident in their ability to leverage that data in compliant ways.”
https://twitter.com/Signal/status/1295318235764731905
Beyond scores
In recent years, TransUnion has been extending from just supplying credit check data to leveraging consumer purchase and other data for the purposes of ad targeting.
Privacy regulations and new limits on ad-tracking are compelling companies to gain and better-leverage information supplied by customers in an opt-in fashion, the trend in people-based marketing.
Last year, TransUnion invested in Tru Optik, a firm enabling ad targeting and measurement for OTT TV.
“With consumer privacy (regulation) and third party cookie challenges … it’s just so critically at the front and center for marketers today to have a really good understanding themselves, in the first party, of how their consumers and customers are leveraging their assets,” Weinstein says.
Credit Score Giant TransUnion Making Moves in Media Sector, Matt Spiegel explains
Real-time ID updates
“Signal was an absolute pioneer in that space, in enabling our clients to onboard their customer data, such that we could post what we would call a ‘brand graph’,” she adds.
“When you combine our real-time data collection – meaning, take our data collection, our original tag business, but evolved into real digital and real time data collection across all owned and operated properties of our clients…
“We have the ability to dynamically update a first-party graph with those actions, intent signals, if you will.
“Our ability to dynamically update that graph and allow our clients to segment their customers, based on those real time actions and behaviours and identify them, has become a core part of our differentiated offering.”
‘Best of both’
She hopes the TransUnion acquisition will lead to great outcomes.
“You take their mass footprint and scale of data and insights, and you combine that to some of the early pioneering approaches of the marketing technology that Signal has – the-real time data collection and dynamic updating of that customer understanding,” she says…
“And I hope and expect that that combination becomes truly a game changing opportunity for our clients and many other potential clients to leverage both of those aspects
“(They) get kind of the best of both, which is pretty compelling. “
