Mobile ad exchange cargo attention acquisition platform Parsek Media has acquired.
The deal reflects Cargo’s focus investment as an effective metric for post-cookie mobile advertising, said Cargo CEO Harry Cargman, who declined to share how much he paid for the assets.
On the way out of cookies, this is a good time to adopt a new currency that allows brands to buy ads based on cost per second instead of CPM, Cargman said.
Kargo now owns the rights to Parsec’s “politely interrupted” screen-takeover mobile ad format, which inserts a video or display ad on the body of a web page that users can see as they scroll through the page. The ads are sized to take up most of the screen of a device while they are visible, and users can continue scrolling to remove the ad from their screen.
And Parsec gets tech stacks designed to measure and package attention-grabbing data for sale to cargo advertisers, says Mark Goldman, Adelaide’s founder and CEO.
Parsec Media launched Adelaide in 2019 as a performance tool for brand marketing and later turned it into its own company with the same ownership. According to Goldman, the decision to sell Parsek’s assets was driven by the need to separate Parsek’s media-centric business from Adelaide’s measure-centric business.
“We understand you can’t really run media and measure under one roof. Our desire was to focus on measurement, ”Goldman said.
Cargo Parsek’s technology will be used by advertisers to create its offer for purchases versus seconds of on-screen exposure, Cargman said. Cargo’s cost-per-second metrics will include third-party verification from providers such as Oracle’s Total Analytics.
The built-in code requires an integration from the publisher side and allows non-standard, non-IAB ad formats to be served programmatically on the open web. When an ad is served, the code triggers an event to measure how many seconds the ad stays on-screen. The code also triggers third-party verification engines
“Most advertisers want a trusted third party to verify if they’re going to pay you based on some type of currency,” Cargman said.
The technology that Cargo is buying also includes an optimization engine to test A / B cost per second of different ad placements against each other. A machine learning algorithm will weigh a variety of factors, including the creative approach itself and goal setting parameters, such as the presence of first and third-party cookies, time of day, IP address, and context, to determine the best way to drive attention. Outcomes can be measured by total exposure time, average exposure time, and other attention-based metrics.
“Cookies and behavioral targeting are going away, so advertisers are looking for new ways to prove they can get results,” Cargman said.
Cargo expects to complete the integration of Parsek’s technology into its business in the next three to six months.
Parsec’s spinoff company, Adelaide, will continue to operate as a separate brand and maintain ownership of an ownership metric that it operates under the name AU or “Attention Unit” metric.
All of Parsek’s assets that were not acquired by Cargo as part of the deal – including its 25 employees – will be exploited in Adelaide, Goldman said. It will also continue to act as a third party attention measurement partner for Adelaide Cargo.
Parsek is the third acquisition of Cargo in less than three years. Cargo bought Rhombus, an advertising technology company focused on targeting social embedding in articles, in August 2020, followed by StitcherAds, an online retail advertising company, late last year.