AdExchanger
Mar 21, 2022
View entire article
TripleLift, once a scrappy gen-two ad tech startup (though by now a grizzled programmatic veteran), announced its first-ever acquisition on Monday, spending $150 million for Swiss publisher data company 1plusX.
1plusX had raised just over $17 million since it was founded in 2014.
The acquisition is meant to bolster TripleLift’s two-pronged focus on CTV and identity, TripleLift Chief Strategy Officer and co-founder Ari Lewine told AdExchanger.
TripleLift has sponsored content integration tech and identity solutions for programmatic advertising without third-party cookies.
The best way to think about 1plusX, which solves for the identity challenge, is as a revamped version of DMP designed to address post-cookie advertising.
The 1plusX technology plugs directly into a publisher’s first-party site and app data, which it uses to create lookalike audiences and ID matches. As a company based in Europe, 1plusX sets a high bar for itself in terms of privacy rigor.
The value of third-party cookies was their ubiquity – but they were far from perfect.
“Nowadays, even with third-party cookies ostensibly still around, they’re only identifiable half the time in programmatic,” Lewine said.
1plusX’s publisher data often outperforms the value of a third-party cookie in head-to-head testing, he said.
Although it’s almost not a fair fight. Around half the time, its opponent, the cookie, doesn’t even show up.