• by Tyler Loechner , Staff Writer @mp_tyler, November 5, 2014

Audience buying is becoming the new norm in the ad industry, and Adroit Digital, a digital ad tech firm, is looking to take it to new levels by acquiring Arcametrics, a North Carolina-based ad firm with predictive modeling technology. Adroit announced the acquisition on Wednesday, and financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Following the acquisition, Adroit is launching the “Adroit Digital Marketing Collective,” a hub through which audiences buyers can buy, well, audiences.

Adroit claims the Marketing Collective will offer digital advertisers first-party insights and audience models based on over 400 million consumer profiles. The company also says it generates 100 million “deidentified unique buyers” each month, and that there are over 7 trillion possible audience combinations available through the Marketing Collective.

Cutting through the obvious sales speak -- the big numbers, the big words, etc. -- and this is actually a rather interesting announcement, at least in my opinion. The idea is to create a “large-scale, rich pool of shared, anonymized consumer data,” in the words of Jacob Ross, president of Adroit Digital.

Adroit claims the Marketing Collective houses shared first-party commerce data (source anonymously) from over 250 brand advertisers. Marketers can also tap into direct, private and open exchanges through the Marketing Collective.

A recent report from the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) found that nearly all (96%) of marketers believe that the “ability to make data-informed decisions is their most-needed capability to respond effectively to disruptions.” However, the same report found that over one-third of companies are not using data to make decisions.

So while data is the lifeblood of exchange-based trading and audience-buying, it’s clear that not every marketer has the data they desire. And data exchanges are not an entirely new proposition, but Adroit’s sticks out because of its focus on the audience.