Connecting the Ad to the Sale Is Getting Expensive

Showing whether an ad ran is becoming the easy part. Amazon and Walmart can also show what happened afterward, which has raised expectations for everyone selling CTV inventory. Buyers increasingly want to know whether an exposed device later showed up at a store and whether a purchase followed.

Infillion is buying Foursquare to add store visits to the purchase data it already owns through Catalina. Best Buy is adding Fire TV inventory to its retail media business, where it already has purchase data from its own stores and site. Google just got hit with a €403 million fine in Ireland over its handling of location data.

Getting from the impression to the sale takes more data, more matching and more companies agreeing on who can use what. It also gives advertisers a much better answer when they decide where the next dollar goes.

Retail Media Put the Sale in the Campaign Report

Amazon and Walmart can do something most CTV sellers can’t do on their own. They can sell an ad and then look inside their own businesses for the transaction.

Walmart has purchase data from its stores and online business. Vizio gives it TV inventory and viewing data. Walmart Connect can put those pieces together and show an advertiser whether an exposed customer later bought the product.

Once advertisers can get that kind of report from one seller, impressions and completion rates have to compete with actual sales data.

That’s the problem Infillion is trying to solve by buying more of the data between the ad and the checkout.

MediaMath gives Infillion the software to buy and deliver ads. Catalina gives it purchase records from participating retailers. Foursquare adds the visit in between.

That lets an advertiser line up three events: the ad ran, an exposed device later showed up at a store, and a purchase followed.

That gives Infillion more of the measurement work to sell alongside media delivery.

Infillion Wants Fewer Vendors Between the Ad and the Sale

Foursquare says its data covers more than 100 million places across 200 countries and an aggregated footprint of 250 million U.S. devices. Catalina brings retailer purchase data. MediaMath handles campaign execution.

Without those pieces under one owner, an advertiser might use one company to buy the media, another to measure store visits and another to connect the campaign with sales. Each vendor needs a contract. Each system needs to match data with another system. Each company takes a fee.

Infillion can now keep more of that work inside the company.

If advertisers buy media, visitation measurement and purchase measurement from Infillion, fewer vendor fees leave the company. It also has fewer outside systems to connect before it can produce the campaign report.

Foursquare still has customers that use competing ad-tech systems, which creates another problem for Infillion. Those customers need Foursquare to remain useful even when their media runs somewhere else.

If agencies or competing ad-tech companies start getting worse access, different pricing or less useful data, some of the business Infillion just bought becomes harder to keep.

So Infillion gets to remove vendors from its own campaigns while still having to behave like a vendor to everyone else. The acquisition pays off faster if Foursquare keeps selling across the market instead of becoming a feature used mostly by Infillion customers.

Best Buy Can Rent Fire TV. The Sales Match Still Has to Be Negotiated

Best Buy’s expanded Amazon deal will let Best Buy Ads sell inventory on new and existing Insignia Fire TVs starting in 2027.

Amazon supplies Fire TV, the programmatic technology and much of the machinery required to run the advertising. Best Buy gets inventory on TVs carrying a brand it owns without spending $2.3 billion to buy a TV manufacturer and its software business the way Walmart did with Vizio.

Best Buy also brings something Amazon doesn’t own: Best Buy purchase data.

Its ad business already offers closed-loop reporting that can connect advertising with online and in-store sales down to the SKU level. That makes the Fire TV deal much more useful if an ad shown on an Insignia set can eventually be matched with a Best Buy purchase.

The announced agreement doesn’t spell out that connection. It doesn’t say whether Best Buy purchase history will be used for targeting on Fire TV, whether an Insignia ad exposure can be matched with a later Best Buy sale or how permissions would work across the two companies.

Without the sales match, Best Buy gets more CTV inventory. With it, Best Buy can tell an electronics brand that somebody saw the campaign and later bought the advertised laptop, soundbar or TV through Best Buy.

Walmart paid for more control. Owning Vizio lets it put TV activity and Walmart purchase data inside businesses it owns. Best Buy avoided the acquisition cost and gets to use Amazon’s technology instead.

Best Buy saves the money required to own and operate the TV software, while more of its advertising product depends on what Amazon lets Best Buy access, match and report.

Google’s €403 Million Fine Shows What Bad Location-Data Handling Costs

Store-visit measurement needs location data. If an advertiser wants to know whether somebody who saw an ad later showed up at a dealership, restaurant or retailer, somebody has to collect enough location information to make that match.

Ireland’s Data Protection Commission fined Google €403 million over its processing of location data through Web & App Activity, Location History and Location Accuracy. The regulator found problems involving lawfulness, fairness, transparency, accountability and retention.

It also said people could have been unaware that their location was being used to influence advertising or infer their interests.

Location data comes with two bills. Companies pay to collect or license it because it can connect an ad exposure to a store visit, then they pay to manage consent, retention, access and partner use. Google’s €403 million fine shows how expensive that second bill can get when the rules around the data aren’t met

A company selling location measurement needs to know where the data came from, what permission covers it, how long it can be kept and what customers are allowed to do with it. Add purchase data and identity matching and there are more records to connect and more rules to follow.

That work costs money before the advertiser sees a single result. Consent systems cost money. Data licensing costs money. Matching costs money. Compliance costs money. Audits and customer controls cost money.

Better measurement can justify a bigger ad budget. Building that measurement also eats into the margin.

The Streaming Wars Take

CTV deals now need to spell out what purchase and location data can be matched to an ad exposure, who can run that match and who gets to show the result to the advertiser.

A retailer with purchase data can keep it inside its own ad business, charge another company for access or limit which partners can connect an impression with a transaction. An ad-tech company without the data has to license it, partner with somebody that has it or buy the company that owns it. A CTV seller running on somebody else’s operating system also needs to know what customer and viewing data it can take into its own measurement product.

Those terms affect the price of the deal. They cover identifiers, matching rights, retention, reporting, methodology and what each company can keep using after the partnership ends.

Buying the data supplier can remove outside fees and give the buyer more products to sell. It also puts the cost of operating that business on the buyer: maintaining the data, keeping outside customers, managing consent and retention, and dealing with regulators when something goes wrong.

Advertisers are asking sellers to get closer to the sale. Sellers that already own transaction data have fewer pieces to buy.

If a seller can’t connect the impression to the sale with data it already controls, somebody else has to supply the missing piece. That cost either comes out of the seller’s margin or gets passed back to the advertiser.