• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, June 4, 2013

MediaMath rolled pixel-free technology acquired from Akamai's ad business in January into its Adroit business unit, relaunching Tuesday as Adroit Digital.

Akamai had built the business unit into a data cooperative -- a large database to house purchase behavior, shopping cart traffic and other insights. Unlike Lotame and eXelate that buy and sell data, there are more than 300 companies contributing to and sharing data in MediaMath Adroit's co-op, according to Adroit General Manager Scott German.

"The more data shared, the more powerful the co-op," German said, although he could not estimate the amount of data. "We have about 300 advertisers and see about $30 million in spend daily, and about 160 million unique users."

A license agreement allows Adroit to take the data off the Akamai network and integrate it into its advertising program for clients like Winterbridge Media, a direct-response agency.

In May, MediaMath began pulling in offline data into Adroit. German calls it an "open hole that's been solved." In the past, the company kept the data for internal use, but sharing reports and insights comes with rebranding the business unit.

MediaMath's business unit Adroit will build a self-service features into the co-operative allowing member companies to run reports and access the data any time. In the next 12 months, member companies will have the ability to run segmented analysis, such as industry or region, with data from the community. It will help to determine whether the company leads or trails in market share for a specific segment or geography.

As the advertising industry moves from touting ample data to integrating data insights, this competitive challenge will push companies to improve data collection, storage and use. eXelate recently opened offices in Chicago, Detroit and Los Angeles to support a growing need for information. The company recently surpassed 1 trillion records pushed monthly to clients worldwide, and started pushing the need for smart and accurate data.

Companies must also manage data; amounts will skyrocket in the coming years Just for mobile, Cisco Systems estimates that by 2017, global mobile data traffic will reach 11.2 exabytes monthly or 134 exabytes annually. Global mobile data traffic will grow at about 66% compounded annual growth rate CAGR from 2012 to 2017.