Time Inc. is to acquire the assets of Viant, the ad technology company, for an undisclosed fee. Viant came about via the combination of Specific Media, Vindico, Xumo and MySpace. The transaction will combine Time’s premium content, subscriber data, and advertising inventory with Viant’s first party data and programmatic capabilities. While we have seen various TV broadcasters and operators making strategic moves into owning their own programmatic tech, it’s relatively rare for publishers to make these kind of investments.
According to a post on Viant’s website, combining Viant’s registration data with Time Inc.’s subscriber database will ‘create a first party dataset that rivals industry leaders Facebook and Google’. While that statement might lead to some raised eyebrows, and not without reason, Viant really does have access to a huge pool of data via the MySpace acquisition.
Sure, it doesn’t have intent data or know what I ‘liked’ yesterday, and most former MySpace users probably aren’t as interested in the bands they interested in back in 2008. But at one point more than a billion people had registered for MySpace, and even if those users don’t use the site today, Viant now still has access to their names and email addresses, as well as things like gender and date of birth. The site also had an opt-in for things like retargeting from all users.
So it’s fair to say that MySpace will be able to cross-reference much of that data with Time Inc.’s (and with third party data from other sources of course) and allow them to enhance their data offering considerably.
Viant also has its ‘Advertising Cloud’ platform which will give Time Inc access to proprietary programmatic ad tech, including for things like data management, targeting, and analytics.
Time Inc. Chairman and CEO Joe Ripp said the acquisition would be ‘game changing’ for his company. “Marketers are selecting media partners that have either data-driven capabilities or premium content; we will be able to deliver both in a single platform, and will stand apart from those that offer just one or the other. In other words, we will be able to deliver advertisers’ messages targeted to optimal audiences across all types of devices, along with the ability to measure ROI.”
“Over a year ago we launched a people-based platform with the Viant Advertising Cloud. With over 1 billion global registered users connected to their households and devices, we knew our data and technology story was solid,” says Tim Vanderhook, CEO of Viant. “The combination of Time Inc. and Viant is all about the marriage of first party data and premium content.”
