Equativ Acquires Sharethrough; Programmatic: The Next TV Currency Battleground

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Sharing Is Acquiring 

Ad tech M&A is alive and well.

On Wednesday, supply-side platform Equativ (formerly known as Smart AdServer) announced its acquisition of Sharethrough, an SSP with a specialty in native advertising. 

Since buyers are trying to work with fewer intermediaries to avoid fees and poor frequency management, SSPs have two choices to avoid getting cut: differentiate or consolidate.

For Sharethrough, the deal marks a second round of SSP consolidation. Back in 2021, it merged with District M, as both of the smaller exchanges faced the pressures of supply-path optimization.

Equativ said it’s buying Sharethrough to make sure it has a bigger foothold in the US, Adweek reports. Only about 40% of Equativ’s business is in the US, whereas most of Sharethrough’s clients are based in North America, which means there is minimal client overlap.

CTV is also part of the appeal (similar to the rest of this month’s acquisitions). Sharethrough has more CTV integrations than Equativ, which is 60% display, according to Adweek. Speaking of consolidation, it’s the second SSP to get gobbled up by another ad tech company this month, following Seedtag’s acquisition of Beachfront last week.

Currency Contention

Upfront negotiations are in full swing. Which means it’s time for more measurement announcements.

On Wednesday, Yahoo’s DSP announced new integrations with Comscore, VideoAmp and iSpot for connected TV ad buying. Its integrations with Nielsen’s three video currency rivals should be complete by the fourth quarter, when upfront deals take effect, Digiday reports.

As more advertisers buy CTV programmatically, alt currencies are competing for business from advertiser clients and DSP partners with better data than basic age and gender demos. Nielsen, meanwhile, is hurrying to add larger data sets to its TV currency product.

Specifically, the incumbent’s adversaries are trying to compete with identity data.

VideoAmp, for one, is using its new integration with Yahoo to tout the data platform it launched in February, which combines its identity graph with viewership data.

Yahoo also isn’t charging buyers for VideoAmp measurement, whereas iSpot and Comscore come with additional fees, according to Digiday, suggesting Yahoo has already picked its favorite currency provider.

What Broke The Brokers

Third-party data graphs are filled with junk inferences. But ad industry incentives, which prioritize having scaled segments to sell, prevent data brokers from cleaning up their graphs, The Record reports.

For example, Check My Ads’ Arielle Garcia says brokers profile her as “a Southeast Asian single mother of two when she is childfree, married and has an ethnicity based in every continent except for Asia.”

Most inferences are just “informed guesses,” says Jordan Abbott, chief privacy officer at data broker Acxiom.

But how informed are these guesses, really? Third-party data graphs are built using online behavioral tracking based on unreliable cookie matches. And even walled garden platforms like Meta and Google, which have first-party data on their users, are prone to errors.

The bigger problem, Garcia says, is that “the more categories you’re in, the more likely [brokers] are to be able to monetize.” If a data graph labels a consumer as both a likely Democratic voter and a likely Republican voter, the broker can sell that data to advertisers looking to appeal to either party.

And these graphs aren’t getting any more accurate. According to researcher Nico Neumann, “The quality of consumer profiles sold by many data brokers shows no improvement over what we measured eight years ago.”

But Wait, There’s More!

Oracle’s ad business is ending not with a bang but a whimper. Down to just $300 million in annual revenue, the company said it’s exiting the ads business during its earnings call. [Adweek]

The deal is off: National Amusements halts discussions with Skydance Media on the proposed merger with Paramount. [CNBC]

Is Netflix turning into a franchise factory? [Variety]

An interview with Elizabeth Tucker, the Googler responsible for the March Core Update. [Search Engine Roundtable]