Semrush helps companies optimize their online content, so you might wonder why they’d buy Kompyte, a company that gathers B2B competitive intelligence online. The answer is they’re assembling a cache of data that helps salespeople do a better job. Information scraped from the web might not exactly qualify as first-party data, but it’s definitely something that Semrush can use as it likes.
First-party data is the new whatever-commodity-you-think-is-most-precious (personally, I go with Fritos). So the lust to assemble more of it drives many industry deals. For example, TV measurement vendor iSpot recently bought Tunity, an app that lets users listen to TV audio in public places like bars, if you remember what those are. There’s some advertising revenue to be gained but the real value is tracking out-of-home TV viewing.
Questex runs digital and live events related to hospitality, health, and communications, so there’s no question it owns a trove of first-party data. They’ve just made that that trove even trovier by launching Q Activate, which assembles all the information in a single platform to make it easier to understand what’s on the mind of B2B decision makers.
In partnership with attention metrics provider Adelaide, The Trade Desk is now offering high attention inventory to advertisers. Attention — often based on reactions of opt-in panels to ads — is now competing with viewability as a valued attribute, and is being used to complement contextual metrics. Attention has been used in the past to test ads once they have been published; now it’s entering the pre-bid space.