Cisco Allegedly Looking At A Future Acquisition Of Quantcast

The industry blogs are buzzing about Cisco’s new investment in Quantcast. Quantcast announced yesterday that they had raised $27.5 million with Cisco being a significant investor in the round.

The company’s technology is focused around site analytics, but earlier this year sought to move into audience segmentation with the launch of the Quantcast Media Program. Quantcast haven’t had much traction with the new initiative when compared to the number using its analytical platform. It is thought that the new investment will be used to hire resource to push its QMP.

Why are Paidcontent and All Things Digital getting so bothered about Cisco getting involved? Since Adobe’s audacious acquisition of Omniture, the big analytic players have been on M&A watch. Paidcontent, in particular, thinks Cisco has a vested interested (namely, future acquisition) in funding a company that could replicate online targeting to other mediums:

Cisco’s involvement reflects the same desire that spurred Adobe (NSDQ: ADBE) to purchase audience researcher Omniture (NSDQ: OMTR) for $1.8 billion back in September: that is, to extend its ability to match its content delivery systems to advertising in one end-to-end service.

So far, the ability to extend the kind of ad targeting done online to TV set-top boxes has remained small (as in the case of Google (NSDQ: GOOG) TV Ads) or been put on hold (as in the case of Canoe Ventures), more and more companies are vying to be the standard the industry turns to. Quantcast has certainly evolved rapidly over the past few years and it’s as well-positioned as any of the other audience researchers to make some significant strides in the space.

Invite Media Officially Opens European Office

The battle for the buy-side begins in earnest. Invite Media officially announced the opening of its new European office. Read the official release here.

Headed up by former Right Media Business Development Manager, Paul Turner, Invite Media is aiming to get Europe’s big ad agencies trading across its platform – and in the process bring some efficiency to the European buy-side.

Europe has a big display market, but it’s horribly fragmented. No one platform will dominate in aggregating unsold ad inventory, and the DSP that can access as many inventory sources (ad exchanges, some ad nets, private exchanges, publisher exchanges, and “dark pools”) will win the day. The number of agencies and media buyers trading in the exchange marketplace is still relatively small - but you’d expect Invite Media, the-soon-to-arrive MediaMath and the other DSPs to push the envelope in 2010.

Automated and optimised ad trading is coming to an agency near you. Finally.