Why 4INFO Is a Great Match for Cadent

Today Cadent announced our acquisition of 4INFO, an industry pioneer in cross-device audience data and media activation. 

This marks a significant leap forward for advertisers activating orchestrated cross-platform campaigns across premium long-form video – 4INFO’s technology combined with Cadent’s linear and addressable buy-side and sell-side technology will allow advertisers to match their data to actual U.S. TV viewing households, and find and reach audiences across channels faster and more accurately. 

Cadent began working with 4INFO in late 2018 when Cadent began building its proprietary TV graph to enable activation and measurement across, traditional cable, broadcast, linear addressable and OTT. 

Because Cadent sits at the nexus of traditional and advanced TV, we face unique challenges in terms of harmonizing data sets spanning fundamentally different levels of granularity, e.g. person and household viewership audiences and viewership, impressions and spots delivery, etc. As we began integrating our core data sources with the 4INFO graph, we began to see firsthand how well it performed as a general matching fabric across our core data assets.  

In addition to scale, the 4INFO technology blew us away in an area that was not originally at the top of our evaluation criteria: speed. The 4INFO team put in extra development cycles to build their platform to be self-service and scalable on day one. Audience segments are onboarded and matched to the TV universe in minutes, which allows Cadent’s technology to develop bespoke audience-based plans in a fraction of the time it took previously.

We’re also excited to leverage 4INFO’s real-time activation in our buy-side platform. Through a single console, buyers will be able to plan and execute traditional TV, addressable linear and OTT all through a single console, with direct pipes to inventory, including inventory enabled by Cadent’s sell-side technology. And most importantly, the platform will orchestrate activation across platforms rather than simply plan each individually, i.e real-time channel adjustments for maximizing reach, etc. This is only possible through Cadent’s execution technologies having the full context of executed and scheduled delivery across platforms. More announcements to come on Cadent’s media orchestration as that’s a lengthy topic in its own right.  

Traditional TV, addressable linear and OTT all have their unique purpose in media plans. Cross-platform orchestration remains the industry’s biggest pain point. Building tools to support orchestration is a massive challenge given the varying granularities of data available, and building around digital or TV-only data sets would put kids gloves on investments that require precision. The addition of 4INFO to Cadent’s graph technology provides the keystone to solving this problem, and we’re looking forward to helping our clients take big steps forward in orchestrating cross-platform video investments in 2020. 

Learn more about Cadent’s acquisition of 4INFO.