ZoomInfo moved deeper into the marketing and advertising space with the launch of Targeted Audiences.  The newly unveiled B2B data service “gives digital agencies and marketers the ability to target their ideal customers with unprecedented accuracy.”  Targeted Audiences are built from the ZoomInfo Data Cloud, which includes 500 million emails and phone numbers for nearly 100 million professional contacts.

ZoomInfo was in the advertising space in its early years but spun off its Bizo platform in 2008.  At the time, CEO Yonatan Stern said, “We realized our business information index allowed marketers to deliver targeted online ads at a level never before seen.”  

Since then, ZoomInfo has acquired a deeper set of contacts and richer firmographics, technographics, funding data, benefits plans, and event data, supporting superior targeting precision.

Unfortunately, Bizo was acquired by LinkedIn in 2014 for $175 million but folded 18 months later when LinkedIn balked at the integration cost.  

Targeted Audiences should be viewed as a new market entry for the firm, but one that supported a $175 million opportunity back in 2014.  The October acquisition of Clickagy fueled this market entry as Clickagy intent data is deployed programmatically via data marketplaces.

“With the team at Clickagy now on the ZoomInfo team, our familiarity with the advertising space accelerated from 0 to 60 mph almost overnight.  The combination of our massive Data Cloud with a select few experts in advertising data allowed us to quickly discover the path to making our data actionable,” blogged Derek Smith, SVP of Innovation and Data R&D.

ZoomInfo launched the programmatic service with over fifty pre-packaged audiences “built on advanced demographic and firmographic data.”  ZoomInfo offered several examples outside of their core technology and business services customer base:

• Educational institutions can target individual contributors and managers employed by firms with tuition reimbursement.
• Optometrists can market to employees of companies with vision plans.
• Luxury brands can reach out to C-level execs at firms with more than one hundred employees.
• Financial advisory firms can target director-level employees of firms that recently went public.

ZoomInfo is passing audience identifiers to the LiveRamp data connectivity platform.  LiveRamp maps identifiers to channels, screens, and devices for media activation.  Additional partner platforms will be brought online in the coming weeks.

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Continue to Part II.