• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, March 24, 2014

When Neustar acquired Aggregate Knowledge, a leading independent online data management platform, for $119 million a number of people in the ad technology community reacted by saying, “What’s Neustar?” Months later, Neustar hopes to change that, unveiling a new platform that integrates the best of the old Aggregate Knowledge’s online audience targeting capabilities with some of the most powerful real-world data on consumers and their behaviors.

The new platform, aptly named PlatformOne, integrates a multitude of offline data about consumers -- everything from their land and mobile phone numbers (among other things, Neustar operates the nationwide Caller ID service), and a variety of inbound and outbound marketing databases -- into one of the most unified systems for targeting people based on their real-world attributes and their online behavior.

The launch, which follows Oracle’s $400 million acquisition of BlueKai, comes at a time when others are trying to close the loop between online cookie-based tracking behavior and offline -- and other digital -- attributes. And during a briefing at MediaPost’s offices last week, Neustar executives say it will continue to be a work in progress, but they claim that PlatformOne represents one of the best centralized views of consumer behavior organized to date.