Rakuten brings mobile programmatic in-house with aquisition of Deep Forest
Rakuten Marketing, the digital arm of ecommerce company Rakuten, is to take its mobile pogrammatic trading in-house after acquiring Deep Forest Media, a demand-side platform (DSP) it hopes accelerates efforts to build a "superior" mobile ad platform.
The aim is to combine Deep Forest Media's cross-device algorithm and Rakuten's consumer data to allow advertisers to personalise mobile campaigns with hyper-local targeting, user segmentation across devices, and dynamic creative optimisation.
Rakuten Marketing has pulled these mobile ad capabilities in the belief that it will bolster customer engagement across all its channels, particularly display.
“With mobile commerce projected to reach $298bn in 2015 we wanted to invest in a company and team that bring strong mobile capabilities to align with our vision,” said Tony Zito, chief executive, Rakuten Marketing.
“A critical part of that is integrating cross-device engagement and conversion data into our proprietary attribution solutions to reinforce and expand our commitment to performance and transparency.”
The motivation behind the acquisition aligns with Rakuten Marketing’s aim to drive the omni-channel experience, which aims to improve cross-channel performance with marketing built around the consumer experience.
The acquisition comes on the heels of the launch of Rakuten Marketing’s proprietary omni-experience attribution tool, Cadence Essential.