• by Tobi Elkin  @tobielkin, March 10, 2017

Ad-tech firm AcuityAds Holdings Inc. said it will spend $10 million cash to acquire Visible Measures Corp., a programmatic platform for video ad analytics, in a bid to capture a bigger share of the video ad and programmatic TV market. The transaction is expected to be completed on or about March 31.

The deal, announced Thursday, marks the second one in six months for AcuityAds, which recently spent $20 million for 140 Proof, an ad-tech startup that collects data from public social profiles. To finance its latest micro-acquisition, publicly traded, Toronto-based AcuityAds will raise $5.5 million (CDN $7.5 million).

AcuityAds’ technology enables advertisers to target audiences across mobile, video, social, and display platforms.

The Visible Measures platform has a proprietary dataset and patented programmatic technology that combines five trillion data points to reach more than 500 million unique monthly users across 600,000 Web and mobile properties. This is supposed to help advertisers optimize their ad spend based on competitive data collected in real time.

Visible Measures' True Reach technology has become an accredited metric by the Media Rating Council (MRC) for video advertising campaigns. MRC accreditation is increasingly important as advertisers demand more accountability for advertising metrics and measurement.

The digital video advertising sector hit $10 billion in the U.S. in 2016 and is expected to approach $20 billion by 2020. By 2018, U.S. advertisers are projected to spend $4.43 billion on programmatic TV ads, according to eMarketer.