As we have reported recently Dun & Bradstreet has made two important acquisitions to boost its Marketing and Sales Solutions business
Outsell’s Randy Giusto, VP & Lead Analyst – Media and Marketing Strategy and Intelligence Solutions, commented recently that through these deals, D&B acquires more data, an identity graph, global privacy compliance expertise, pipes to over 25 other platforms (including leading social ones), and entry into consumer data from a B2B2C perspective. It becomes a formidable B2B2C MarTech and AdTech player almost overnight.
Dun & Bradstreet is acquiring two B2B marketing data companies, Eyeota and NetWise, to build upon its own audience solutions business. The deal extends D&B’s global scale and presence in offline and online data while also moving the company into the consumer data space from a B2B2C perspective. Both companies will roll up under D&B’s Sales and Marketing Solutions (SMS) business unit. D&B will disclose the financial details of both deals later, with Eyeota closing shortly and NetWise in December.
Eyeota currently offers B2B and B2C custom and syndicated audience segments as well as cohort onboarding of data. Eyeota also helps distribute those audiences for programmatic advertising and contextual and site personalization to an ecosystem of over 50 other MarTech and AdTech providers — all in a privacy-compliant way. Eyeota’s Partner Distribution Network is an ecosystem with pipes that extend into leading marketing and advertising platforms from Adobe, Google, Lotame, MediaMath, Neustar, Oracle, Salesforce, The Trade Desk, and others. Eyeota can also help activate audiences on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
NetWise joins offline and online data, offers business personas tied to online personas, and helps with audience creation. It can also activate audiences across popular demand-side platforms, CRMs, and connected TV and social channels. In addition, NetWise offers its Data Universe, with data on 30 million US businesses, 100 million US businesspeople, 250 million US consumers, and 70 million consumer-to-business linkages, all while managing over 500 B2B and over 150 standard consumer segments. At the core of NetWise is its proprietary Business to Consumer Identity Graph, which helps link billions of business and consumer signals.
Giusto states that these two deals come with many benefits. Overall, they help transition D&B from a vendor selling B2B targeting data and custom audience solutions to one that also helps with actual campaign execution. D&B can now not only identify and reach companies and people but engage with them as well. The company also gains access to many more pipes into popular AdTech and MarTech platforms through Eyeota’s ecosystem. This new access allows D&B to quickly extend its data reach and its company identifier — the DUNS number — far and wide, without having to build those pipes on its own. The company also gets to leverage Eyeota’s global privacy compliance work.
Through NetWise, D&B gains an identity graph to run its data through as well as access to consumer data. This makes D&B a formidable data provider in the B2B2C space, right in the middle of today’s work-from-home and work-from-anywhere dynamic. D&B can now help marketers and advertisers engage with people through consistent messaging between their work/home and online/offline experiences.
Existing D&B SMS customers benefit from this deal. NetWise’s identity graph will help improve D&B’s data match rates. The consumer-to-business linkages will help those B2B marketers using D&B’s tools who are clamoring to reach companies and professionals more directly online. Where they might have relied more heavily on events to reach key decision-makers in the past, they now must find avenues to reach them through work-from-home or work-from-anywhere paths.
LiveRamp and Data Axle are the firms most threatened by D&B’s moves here. Both are leading B2C and B2B data solutions providers due to their MarTech and AdTech approaches to the market. Notably, neither company shows up in the ecosystem pipes built by Eyeota, so they don’t lose a route to market for their data with this deal. D&B’s DUNS number serves as a unique business identifier that many B2B customers depend on to identify whom to target for their marketing and sales efforts; LiveRamp and Data Axle don’t have anything like it. In terms of Eyeota’s Partner Distribution Network, some partners may need to spend time and money reevaluating their partnership agreements if they feel they compete more directly with D&B now.
Giusto feels that D&B has its work cut out in integrating the acquired companies in its Marketing and Sales Solutions business. He sees that D&B needs to take this opportunity to make the DUNS number central to unifying online and offline B2B data — and now, consumer data — linked to professional behaviors. This includes elevating the DUNS even more in terms of its positioning through the Eyeota platform ecosystem. Post-acquisition, D&B needs to integrate Eyeota’s and NetWise’s solutions and teams quickly into its SMS portfolio and go-to-market message (as compared to its Lattice Engines and Orb Intelligence acquisitions).
Other B2B data providers in the Eyeota Partner Distribution Network will now need to reevaluate their relationships with Eyeota. This includes companies like Bombora, Equifax, Experian, Future, HG Insights, MeritB2B, Stirista, and Ziff Davis. They’ll continue to partner if they’re comfortable with D&B as the owner; those not comfortable will need to double down on existing LiveRamp and Data Axle relationships, or, if they don’t exist, create them to redirect their data pipes to them.
Another lesson learned from this deal is that companies looking to extend their market reach through acquisition — by either covering more customer workflow needs or moving into an adjacent market — might want to look no further than current close partners. In other words: Buy Close Friends.
D&B’s been working with Eyeota for at least five years and saw the firm as a key distribution channel partner for its B2B audience data. The company also has a relationship with NetWise, using its data. Quite often, B2B data companies partner to use each other’s data to fill in holes, improve data quality, or append new fields. Because of the lesser effort required in integration, it’s often easier to acquire a known friend than an unknown company.
Another advice from Randy Giusto was to “Address Today’s Work Environment with Performance-Driven Content”
The current work-outside-the-office movement playing out globally is having a profound impact on the business of B2B marketing and sales. With events making a slower recovery than expected, many B2B marketers will reallocate event spending for the second year in a row, focusing more on digital activities to inform a buyer’s journey along the way. B2B media and data providers need to deliver an activity that creates demand, data from it in the form of nurtured and scored leads that identify high interest, and then performance-driven, personalized content to help sales close the deal.
Source: Courtesy Outsell, Inc., one of the leading global business information consultancy and a cofounder of BIIA.
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