The promise of CTV and OTT advertising is fundamentally reshaping the ad tech landscape. With the Rubicon and Telaria deal closing out 2019, last week, Cadent, the advanced TV advertising company, announced its own acquisition of 4INFO. The deal will expand Cadent’s ad-buying and targeting capabilities to CTV and OTT. Terms, unfortunately, were not disclosed.
According to a report from eMarketer, last year, CTV and OTT ad spend grew nearly 40% to $7 billion. It’s expected to exceed $10 billion by 2021. As investments explode, more platforms and vendors are broadening their solutions and services to meet the opportunity.
Enter 4INFO for Cadent. The two have actually been partners since 2018, with 4INFO powering the CTV and OTT buying in Cadent’s DSP (to this point, Cadent has primarily focused on linear and addressable TV advertising). Now, however, by owning 4INFO outright, Cadent can more closely integrate its technology across its own platform.
This integration also unlocks enhanced targeting for Cadent buyers. As TV viewing fragments across devices, brands are challenged to couple apps, set-top boxes and connected TVs with individual households. 4INFO’s technology tries to solve this problem with an audience graph that can tether TV devices and a home address. Here’s a bit more context from the 4INFO website:
“Using home address as the match key gives 4INFO the ability to target more precisely using first-, second- and third-party data. We are also able to measure campaign results in actual sales, proving the value of your cross-screen campaigns with return on ad spend.”
In turn, this level of granularity unlocks more accurate ad targeting and measurement for buyers.
Nick Troiano, Cadent’s CEO, says that “the integration of the 4INFO household graph and its OTT capabilities with the Cadent Advanced TV Platform creates the industry’s only unified platform for all forms of data-driven television.”
According to Tim Jenkins, CEO of 4INFO, “Cadent’s scale across all forms of advanced TV will further 4INFO’s mission of enabling unified audiences at scale that are fully actionable across screens and properties. We are pleased to continue our journey helping advertisers evolve their television advertising as part of Cadent.”
While Cadent has made its own acquisition here, last spring, there were rumors that Cadent was actually being eyed as an acquisition target by Comcast (along with DataXu who is now off the board after being acquired by Roku). As the Cadent platform expands with new in-demand CTV and OTT capabilities, those rumors are likely to continue throughout the New Year.
