TransUnion to acquire ID resolution company Neustar

TransUnion has agreed to acquire identity resolution company Neustar for $3.1 billion. Neustar’s OneID resolution platform will expand the capabilities of TransUnion’s identity solutions, especially in the adtech space.

Over the course of the last two to three year, TransUnion has been focused on assembling a portfolio of solutions to serve digital marketers. Most recently, they launched a suite of identity products including the TruAudience Data Marketplace and TruAudience Platform.

“TransUnion’s acquisition of Neustar makes sense, because it nicely complements Tru Optik’s assets and it gives Neustar access to a huge offline data source,” said Hugo Loriot, Partner at You & Mr Jones data company, fifty-five. “TransUnion already struck deals with media agencies to power identity solutions in the past but it was lagging behind Experian in the audience addressability space.”

TransUnion acquired Tru Optik, Signal Digital and TruSignal in 2019 and 2020. This summer, the Tru Optik identity graph was folded into the TruAudience suite, becoming the TruAudience Data Marketplace,

Loriot added: ”The question is now whether identity graph providers and owners of sensitive offline data sources like Credit Bureau should be under one roof, like Experian-Tapad and now TransUnion-Neustar, or kept separate like Liveramp. The second question is scalability outside of the US. Marketers are feeling frustrated that the martech use cases they can unlock in the US cannot be replicated elsewhere. Except for Liveramp, no American identity resolution vendor has a European presence, and the TransUnion deal is again 100% focused on the U.S., widening the gap between the EMEA and U.S. martech landscape.”

Why we care. The TransUnion release suggests that eventually the Neustar acquisition will eventually scale globally, but not immediately. For marketers, the trend to leverage the vast consumer data resources of TransUnion or Experian means that advertising can still be relevant and addressable through streaming and other digital channels.

Dig deeper: Streaming is surging