• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, July 7, 2015

As part of a long-term strategy to finally integrate two of the biggest sectors of marketing expenditures -- consumer and trade promotions -- Inmar has acquired Scanner Applications, a leading trade promotion management and tracking firm.

By integrating SA’s data, technology and management services into Inmar’s consumer promotion services, the company says it will create the industry’s “first single-source solution.” Usually the term single-source applies to a single sample of consumers being tracked over time, so it wasn’t clear from this morning’s announcement exactly how Inmar will pull that off, but it has quietly been amassing a humongous database capable of analyzing consumer promotion expenditures and performance down to individual consumers.

If it can integrate trade promotions -- typically money that brands pay retailers to “push” their product via in-store promotions like “end-aisle displays,” in-store media and/or so-called “store coupons” that provide an added discount incentive for a consumer to purchase a brand’s product, Inmar might finally be able to close the loop between the two forms of promotion and give brand marketers and retailers a better handle on where their ROI is coming from and how to optimize their spending.

“Never before has one company been able to manage all promotion-related activities on a single platform and provide analytics and reporting relative to their performance,” Inmar Chairman-CEO David Mounts boasts in a statement in this morning’s announcement .