Thunder boosts personalization and performance following Adacus acquisition

Creative management platform Thunder is announcing this week that it has completed its purchase of AI-powered targeting platform Adacus — and, as a result, is adding three capabilities to improve personalization and performance. Deal terms were not made public.

CEO Victor Wong told me that Thunder, which offers tools for creative ad production, had been working since last year with Adacus, which focuses on measurement and targeting. As a result, the two platforms are already integrated. Both companies are based in San Francisco.

Post-acquisition, Thunder now offers creative multi-touch attribution, where it can measure the contribution of a particular creative element like a photo to a conversion.

So that a brand can determine whether the photo or another element should get that much credit for a sale, the methodology is disclosed. Here’s a Thunder screen showing various creative elements being assembled:

Thunder also now offers its own post-bid contextual personalization, where a page’s content category is determined in order to guide what kind of creative ad is delivered after the bid has been accepted. Categories from the Interactive Advertising Bureau are supported, as well as custom ones such as medical.

And the third new capability is a deterministic cross-device graph, where Thunder can connect household devices through a persistent ID like a street address, email address or IP. This informs Thunder’s message sequencing, so that a brand doesn’t, for instance, send the same ad to three different devices in the same household in the same hour.

Wong said that, as far as he knows, no other creative platform offers creative multitouch attribution or cross-device identification, and that Sizmek is the only other creative tool provider with in-house contextual personalization. Most tools offering pre- or post-bid contextual personalization, he said, obtain it as a service from provider GrapeShot.

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About The Author

Barry Levine

Barry Levine covers marketing technology for Third Door Media. Previously, he covered this space as a Senior Writer for VentureBeat, and he has written about these and other tech subjects for such publications as CMSWire and NewsFactor. He founded and led the web site/unit at PBS station Thirteen/WNET; worked as an online Senior Producer/writer for Viacom; created a successful interactive game, PLAY IT BY EAR: The First CD Game; founded and led an independent film showcase, CENTER SCREEN, based at Harvard and M.I.T.; and served over five years as a consultant to the M.I.T. Media Lab. You can find him at LinkedIn, and on Twitter at xBarryLevine.