Data giant Experian is riding the curation wave.
Today, the company announced it’s acquiring data curation adtech business Audigent. As I understand it (and I could be wrong—correct me if so), Audigent has its code on publisher pages, giving it access to unique data for its three core products: SmartPMP (publisher first-party data + premium PMP inventory), ContextualPMP (AI-powered contextual signals + curated PMP inventory), and CognitivePMP (ML-based predictive audiences + multi-SSP PMP inventory).
All three solutions provide ID-less addressability but use different approaches to get there. Each is also a curation play, combining data with PMP inventory and activating it via SSPs rather than DSPs.
With this acquisition, Experian strengthens and safeguards its business in a few key ways. It enters the sell-side, gaining access to publisher data and Audigent’s PMP inventory. With cookies and hashed emails either disappearing or facing increased scrutiny, first-party data access has become crucial—and this deal expands Experian’s capabilities in that area. It also positions Experian to deliver on curation and activate data through SSPs.
The deal builds on an existing three-year relationship, according to the press release. The two companies had already integrated, with Experian audience segments available through SmartPMP. They also launched a joint contextual product a few months ago.
Why This Matters:
This is an interesting deal that speaks to a few market trends. First, it highlights continued M&A in adtech (though deal terms were not disclosed). Zeta Global’s acquisition of LiveIntent comes to mind as a comparable. That deal also gave a company access to a publisher business built on first-party data. Will we see more M&A around curation businesses in the coming months? Epsilon, for example, has a partnership with Audigent, too. How does this affect them? Would they buy a curation player?
This is also, I believe, the first notable curation-focused acquisition we’ve seen lately. Curation has been a hot adtech topic for months. It has staying power, especially as it challenges the traditional DSP stranglehold on steering the industry’s future. It will be interesting to see how much curation activity ramps up through deals or simply new entrants.
Experts React:
Here are some notable reactions to the deal from adtech X:
(By the way, this feels like a good year for Eric Franchi.)
Our Take:
So, we’re never going to get away from curation, right? I joke! Consider these announcements in addition to today’s news over the past few months:
- Last month, Google announced a new curation tool for Google Ad Manager.
- Also last month, Direct Digital Holdings said it was planning to launch curation segments for its SSP, Colossus.
- In October, Nexxen talked up curation with its Deal Marketplace.
- Prohaska, also in October, said it was building a curated group of news publishers.
And this is just sort of scratching the surface. Between these announcements, there have been countless others and a lot of debate about what curation actually is and means (is it just an ad network, etc.). Is it good for publishers? Bad? All of this is still driving discussion.
To that end, even as we enter the M&A curation phase, as a concept, curation still remains a bit… amorphous. Unsettled? There’s confusion between straight curation (a curated list of publishers, like TTD’s SP500, or what Prohaska is doing) and programmatic curation (combining a dataset with select slices of inventory). Or maybe the concept is simple and we’ve convinced ourselves there’s more to it? (In adtech, complexity = comfort.)
