YuMe Acquires Crowd Science Audience Targeting Technology Company

Related: Business

YuMe, a leading provider of digital brand advertising software and services, announced the acquisition of Crowd Science, an innovative audience targeting technology company. CITRUS, Crowd Science's audience measurement and targeting platform, builds on the capabilities of Audience Amplifier, YuMe's technology used to enhance audience reach and targeting across all video devices. This technology will allow brand advertisers to target more segments and provide better insights into brand-receptive audiences.

"We've been laser-focused on enhancing audience measurement, modeling and targeting, and Crowd Science will be the perfect complement to our data science group that's been driving that effort," said Jayant Kadambi, Co-founder & CEO of YuMe. "Crowd Science technology allows us to significantly improve our audience reach, measurement and segmentation capabilities."

The Technology - Why it's important
Direct response advertising excels at guiding consumers on best price and location, whereas brand advertising strikes emotional chords with consumers that build long-term buying relationships. Finding brand-receptive consumers requires new approaches to data-science and audience modeling. CITRUS is unique in that it combines survey, behavioral and contextual data using proprietary machine learning techniques to provide better audience targeting, greater reach and more effective audience measurement.

The Crowd Science Team
In addition to the technology, with this acquisition YuMe is also making noteworthy additions to their engineering and marketing research teams. In 2008, John Wainwright, John Martin and Paul Neto founded Crowd Science with the goal to gain innovative, first-party brand insights on digital media audiences in North America. They have since built an impressive set of audience measurement and modeling tools. In four years of operation, they have generated more than 850 brand-focused audience segments across 165+ million unique users.

"The Crowd Science team is thrilled to join YuMe," said John Martin, Co-Founder of Crowd Science. "The future of brand advertising will be defined by those with strong consumer data and broad reach in video across multiple platforms. The combination of Crowd Science's audience targeting technology and YuMe's Connected Audience Network will allow us to quickly and dramatically move the industry forward."

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