SEVILLE — Back in February, the remnants of MySpace ended up located at Time Inc,when the publisher acquired Viant, the advertising data company that was the latest owner of the once-mighty social network.

But Time’s interest was about more than social. It was buying Viant because of its considerable bank of first-party data about consumers, also including in its Vindico, Specific Media and Xumo units.

The pair planned to pool that data to help advertisers better target consumers. And Jeremy Haft, sales VP at Viant, says the pair are pooling more than they planned to.

“The synergies between the two companies are actually beyond our initial expectations,” he tells Beet.TV in this video interview.”

Haft says marketers’ key challenge is figuring out how to target consumers, no matter what device they happen to be using.

“A lot of marketers and advertisers are looking for data-driven capabilities and the ability to tie those data-driven capabilities to targeting actual people as opposed to the cookie world that the industry has been used to for the past decade or so,” he says.

“A lot of them are still falling on the old KPIs and proxies of click-through rates.”

 

This interview was recorded at the I-com Global Forum for Marketing and Data Measurement in Seville, Spain, April 18 to 21. This video is part of a series from the Forum sponsored by Xaxis.  Please visit this page for more videos from Seville.