Synacor Embraces Programmatic, TiVo to Acquire Digitalsmiths

As programmatic advertising continues to gain traction in the spheres of online and mobile advertising, Synacor, a provider of TV Everywhere technology solutions, has partnered with data management marketing company BlueKai to more efficiently target audiences and create personalized advertising messages.

 

By powering Synacor’s traditional and programmatic buying for agencies, BlueKai will use big data to enhance automated ad buying, a process that allows advertisers to leverage subscriber data points within categories like entertainment, zipcode and the time of day customers view content.

 

The partnership signifies a greater commitment to the automated and real-time bidding aspect of programmatic buying. While some TV networks have not embraced the trend wholeheartedly, others, such as Turner and Weather Channel, have devoted significant amount of resources to digital programmatic buying specifically. Synacor characterizes the latter as “exploding,” citing Magna Global’s prediction that US programmatic display ad spending is expected to reach $17 billion by 2017.

 

In other tech news today, TiVo will acquire cloud-based content discovery service Digitalsmiths, which integrates search, discovery and recommendations across multiple devices. Since Digitalsmiths has relationships with 7 major pay-TV operators, presumably this will allow TiVo to achieve greater penetration of the pay TV market. It’s predicting that Digitalsmiths’ penetration of pay-TV customers will grow from the current 10% to 50% over the next few years.