TransUnion To Acquire Tru Optik

Global information and insights company TransUnion has agreed to acquire data marketplace and data management platform Tru Optik. Tru Optik’s patented household graph of more than 80 million U.S. homes enables household-level identity, targeting and measurement across connected TV, smart speakers, gaming consoles and other connected devices.

The companies say “Tru Optik and TransUnion’s complementary capabilities will provide TransUnion’s expanded customer base with the reach, accuracy and transparency missing in current identity and audience development products.”

“Connected TV has quickly become most consumers’ preferred way to access long form video content. With the standard digital identity signals being sunset, marketers and media companies are looking toward a new generation of identity and audience products to reach the right people and households,” said Matt Spiegel, EVP marketing solutions and media vertical, TransUnion. “Tru Optik has been at the forefront of innovation in this area. Their data marketplace is integrated with the leading buy- and sell-side platforms and is available now for streaming TV and audio campaigns. By bringing our two companies together, our combined assets will result in an expanded suite of solutions that modern marketing requires.”

As a global information and insights company, TransUnion says its “robust consumer data and identity footprint, data modeling and precision data matching expertise, along with cross-category industry knowledge, are critical to effective people-based marketing and meaningfully differentiated from pure digital-data companies. TransUnion and Tru Optik together will address unmet market needs with a focus on streaming TV/audio as part of an omni-channel identity strategy. The combined offering will provide the depth of consumer intelligence necessary for advertisers to connect people with relevant messages.”

Tru Optik’s data marketplace is used by thousands of brands, and its data management platform has seen more than 600% growth, year-over-year. The companies say that by combining their collective data sets, analytic capabilities and market connectivity, TransUnion and Tru Optik “will be able to more precisely — and with greater scale — match individuals and households across the physical and digital worlds.”

“As hundreds of millions of consumers and billions of dollars of advertising continue to shift to connected and streaming media, it is imperative that the advertising and media industry have a trusted, agnostic and impartial source of truth for identity and audience data,” said Andre Swanston, CEO and co-founder, Tru Optik. “As a part of TransUnion, and combined with our first mover status and existing market partnerships, we are well-positioned to serve the industry as a leading identity solution and data provider for all things streaming, now and into the future.”