Walmart has acquired OneRiot, a mobile and social ad targeting startup. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, and OneRiot will be joining Walmart Labs.
As we’ve written in the past, OneRiot recently switched its business model; shutting down its realtime search portal and focusing exclusively on monetizing via its realtime advertising network. The startup then moved into providing a social targeting service for mobile ads within apps.
By way of history, OneRiot first ventured into the advertising world in 2009 with RiotWise, an ad format which places content in an emphasized position in their realtime feed. OneRiot also launched RiotWise Trending Ads, a stream of ads that correspond to trending topics as they emerge across the social web, and rolled out self-refreshing realtime trending ads and a self-service version of RiotWise.
Now, OneRiot allows advertisers to reach targeted audience segments on mobile, from busy moms to tech influencers to sports guys to fashionistas. Segmentation and targeting are based on factors such as audience interest profiles, demographics, social influence and realtime conversations. OneRiot’s audience profiles are created by mining and analyzing public big data social streams from services (i.e. Twitter).
It’s this data mining that attracted Walmart to OneRiot and its technology. From Walmart’s announcement: OneRiot has developed some pretty nifty technology that analyzes social media signals from popular networks like Twitter and Facebook to deliver ads that are relevant to consumers’ interests. As our teams debated the finer points of Big Data, Fast Data, and machine learning technologies, it became clear to us that we could find no better colleagues than the guys at OneRiot.
Walmart has been making some interesting plays in the social, mobile and targeting space. The company acquired social media startup Kosmix earlier this year. Kosmix joined Walmart Labs, and has been working on integrating social technology into Walmart’s online and mobile offerings, including its e-commerce website, Facebook pages and more.