• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, August 13, 2014

IgnitionOne announced Monday the acquisition of Human Demand to strengthen its position in mobile marketing and advertising, and audience and tracking services.

The technology will integrate into IgnitionOne's Digital Marketing Suite (DMS), adding services like mobile display advertising and cross-device tracking. The technology gives brands deeper reach into mobile audiences and users of mobile apps across display, video and rich media. It also adds features in cross-device tracking to support cross-channel attribution and user data.

The most important change this acquisition brings IgnitionOne, its clients, and the industry is in automation. It supports improvements in mobile ad targeting through an integrated platform supported by accurate data.

Brand marketers look for companies that can give them more from less -- meaning better integrated services from fewer vendors and partners. "They want this because they are not systems integrators," IgnitionOne CEO Will Margiloff explains. "Marketers want data from various media, Web site and CRM channels to work in concert with each other, automatically. We solve that monster problem."

Along with Human Demand's 65 billion monthly mobile real-time bidding requests, IgnitionOne acquires the partnerships with major mobile ad exchanges, third-party data providers and access to thousands of mobile publishers. Tag an index for brand safety of more than 2 million apps onto that list. 

The Human Demand acquisition also increases IgnitionOne's programmatic inventory to include mobile-specific partners such as MoPub, Nexage, Smaato, and more, Margiloff said. The technology significantly increases the company's targeting and modeling capabilities in programmatic to include location-based targeting as well as app audience data.

Programmatic buying has been a major part of IgnitionOne's strategy for years, even before the industry referred to audience-automated buying as programmatic. The company built a programmatic display module in its DMS.

DMS, a digital marketing hub centralizing the ability to buy, manage and optimize digital media across search, display, social and mobile, offers a programmatic audience targeting service in the U.S. through its demand side platform (DSP) module, but Netmining also will benefit from this acquisition by expanding mobile advertising and targeting capabilities.
Human Demand CEO Howie Schwartz also joins IgnitionOne based from the company's New York headquarters, along with his team.

Margiloff said the integrated teams will work quickly to integrate Human Demand's technology into IgnitionOne's DMS to build out the company's vision of simplifying marketing, centralizing data and providing the industry with the most complete and integrated technology solution.