• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, January 27, 2016

Digilant, an independent programmatic media company backed by powerful ad industry investors, the Rodes family, is expanding its portfolio and capabilities with the acquisition of technology from DeltaX, a Bangalore-based company specializing in dynamic creative optimization technology. The deal will give brands and agencies using Digilant the ability to target audiences with creative aimed at them specifically.

The deal also represents the most public move yet by ISP Digital, a unit of a Rodes family holding company that has been assembling a portfolio of best-in-breed digital assets in stealth mode, but which will begin to make more noise effective with this acquisition.

ISP Digital -- which is being run by former Havas Digital founder and chief Don Epperson and has a number of former Havas executives on its team, including former Havas Media CEO Maria Luisa Francoli -- is not affiliated with Havas, although the Rodes family also controls that agency holding company, and Digilant and its predecessor company Adnetik were incubated there.

Epperson, who created a leading early digital agency that became the basis of Havas Digital, also developed one of the industry’s first data management platforms, and he has now turned his sights from assembling the best ad tech portfolio to a much bigger play -- marketing tech -- and Digilant is one of the core assets.

Lesser-known assets in ISP Digital’s portfolio include “earned” media platform Acceso and “owned” media platform Antevenio, with Digilant representing its “paid” media play.

According to Epperson, who serves as executive chairman of Boston-based Digilant and CEO of ISP Digital, the latest acquisition is part of a longer-term strategy to provide brands and agencies with a full spectrum of options and flexibility for using digital marketing platforms to target and serve ads and content to consumers.

“What’s happening here is clients are interfacing with programmatic in one of a number of ways,” Epperson says, outlining four distinct models for Digilant that cover four distinct marketplace needs.

Epperson describes Digilant’s core model as an “ad network” or an arbitrage model in which advertisers and agencies simply buy audiences based on the lowest cost Digilant can deliver. In that model, he says Digilant “takes the underlying risk” and guarantees to the price paid by advertisers.

The second model -- which he says is growing in popularity -- uses a “dynamic CPM,” in which marketers take some of the risk of price fluctuation in the market and hedge the marketplace based on their own control and criteria. In that model, Digilant charges a service or technology fee, and doesn’t make a market on the spread.

A third and increasingly popular model involves clients taking the entire process in-house and utilizing Digilant’s platform as their tool for managing it.

The fourth model functions more like a “custom DMP,” or data management platform, in which Digilant essentially helps brands identify and manage their own audience data based on their targeting parameters and goals.

Epperson said the menu-like approach was developed intentionally and is part of a recognition that there is a spectrum of goals, aptitude and desires in the programmatic media marketplace, and Digilant wants to serve all of them. The addition of dynamic creative optimization is just an extension of that.

Future acquisitions and product development within the broader ISP Digital portfolio will follow that same path, Epperson says, but will be aimed at the broader marketing technology marketplace, with a goal of giving CMOs the greatest flexibility of options they can use based on their goals.