Infillion Buys Foursquare, Linking Ads to Outcomes

In the US, ad platform Infillion has announced the acquisition of location intelligence platform Foursquare, and will combine its real-world visitation data with Catalina's purchase intelligence to help advertisers link campaign activity to store visits and real-world purchases.

Headquartered in New York City, Infillion integrates the technologies of acquired companies MediaMath, TrueX, Gimbal, Drawbridge and Catalina, to offer 'the first fully composable advertising platform,' powered by deterministic purchase intelligence and agentic-ready infrastructure.

Foursquare taps deep machine learning technology and data from more than 100 million points of interest across 200 countries, with aggregated coverage of 250 million US devices. Its solutions provide location measurement for brands across verticals, and form the backbone for major mobile apps and AI systems. Clients use the data to understand visitation patterns, target consumers by the types of places they visit, and measure ad impact.

The firms say 'several' members of Foursquare's leadership team will join Infillion after the transaction closes, expanding their Data Business Unit and bringing deep expertise in location intelligence and geospatial technology. Infillion says it will be reviewing Foursquare's consumer applications, Swarm and Superlocal, and consider 'a range of paths including open-source models, strategic partnerships, and opportunities that best support their communities.'

Rob Emrich, Founder & Executive Chairman of Infillion comments: 'Marketers have been trying to prove that their advertising drives real-world outcomes for decades. Walled gardens and retailer apps can only measure what happens inside their own environments. Foursquare is one of the few places with the scaled data to measure what happens in the physical world. Combined with Catalina purchase intelligence, Infillion is now one of the few platforms to accurately connect advertising to outcomes at national scale.'

Gary Little (pictured), CEO of Foursquare, says the sale will augment his company's offering by adding 'significant new real-world outcome data - all inside a platform that can serve customers at scale.'

The firms are online at www.infillion.com and www.foursquare.com .

All articles 2006-23 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas, 2024- by Nick Thomas, unless otherwise stated.