Tacoda Filing Hart-Scott-Rodino Docs Today
Tacoda is filing its required Hart-Scott-Rodino docs today, CEO Curt Viebranz just told ClickZ News
Tacoda is filing its required Hart-Scott-Rodino docs today, CEO Curt Viebranz just told ClickZ News
Tacoda is filing its required Hart-Scott-Rodino docs today, CEO Curt Viebranz just told ClickZ News. Those are the pesky papers necessary to cough up to the Federal Trade Commission when companies agree to mergers and acquisitions. In this case, of course, it’s AOL that’s acquiring the behavioral targeting tech firm.
So, I’ve been wanting to clarify what seemed like conflicting reports following the news of the buy earlier this month. After speaking with AOL and Tacoda about how Tacoda might be integrated with AOL, which owns giganto ad network Advertising.com, the answer seemed to be that AOL would be using the BT tech on its AOL.com site, but it wasn’t yet clear what would happen when it comes to Advertising.com integration.
Another report seemed to note the opposite, stating Tacoda’s longtime competitor in the BT sphere, Revenue Science, would continue enabling behavioral targeting on AOL.com.
Huh?
The fact is no matter what any of these folks say, AOL bought Tacoda for a reason, and surely it will squeeze out whatever it can get. So, it’s doubtful Tacoda won’t be used to power AOL.com’s AND Advertising.com’s behavioral targeting eventually.
Viebranz today told me, “We clearly think there are going to be opportunities to work with both AOL.com and the [Advertising.com] ad network.”
As for Revenue Science, one can imagine a large publisher network or agency picking them up at some point, though evidently they’ve been shopping themselves around for awhile now. WPP bought 24/7 recently. Maybe they’d wanna tack on some behavioral? Or how ’bout Microsoft, which is on a me-too buying spree these days?
As for Google, they seem to be developing their own behavioral-like stuff, and Revenue Science’s technology, from what I understand, is really designed more for individual publisher-side use (what Tacoda was before it went the network route). But, as Google tweaks its privacy policy to accommodate different types of ads and data use, who knows? And Yahoo? Well, they’ve had their own in-house behavioral targeting for years, so I wouldn’t expect them to have a use for Rev Sci.