ExchangeWire rounds up some of the biggest stories in the European digital advertising space. In this week’s edition: Impact Radius buys Forensiq; Snapchat Partners with Oracle; Twitter targets via emojis; Partnership between Uber and Factual; and New C-level additions at Adform. 

Impact Radius acquires Forensiq

A merger that creates a “marketing system with built-in fraud detection”: Impact Radius acquires Forensiq and employs their fraud detection capabilities, the DMP has announced.

"Together, the teams will focus on the development of artificial intelligence technologies, pioneering the new digital currency of attribution, viewability, and ad fraud", says Per Pettersen, CEO, Impact Radius. This is to benefit marketers and analysts, Impact Radius explains: "Exposing and removing fraudulent traffic across devices and ecosystems will create a more pure, real-time data hub for media buyers, analysts, and executives to stay on the same page, share granular insights and maximise marketing ROI."

Cash for the acquisition comes from a recent funding round, which brought USD$30m (£21.3m) into the coffers of Impact Radius. The financial details of the deal were not disclosed.

Concurrently, news has just been released that Forensiq is partnering with MoPub. Forensiq will provide analytics across MoPub’s exchange in order to guarantee high-quality supply of ads for buyers.

Snapchat announces more ads and partnership with Oracle

Is Snapchat on the way to an IPO? The video app is pushing its advertising arm and introduces more space for ads, as well as an ads API. Thanks to the new API, ad space on Snapchat can now be purchased through third parties, instead of relying on direct deals with Snapchat. In further news for advertisers, Snapchat adds Snap Ads Between Stories – i.e. ads which appear among the users’ video content – and introduces editorial quality review for all ads.

The social network has also announced a partnership with Oracle in order to measure the in-store impact of Snapchat ads. This is a move designed to help consumer packaged goods advertisers quantify, and improve their marketing efforts on Snapchat.

According to Oracle, “92% of the Snapchat ad campaigns drove a positive lift in in-store sales” and “Snapchat ad campaigns exceeded Oracle Data Cloud norms on all key metrics, with sales lift being the primary driver”.

Oracle is the latest in a number of partnership brokered by Snapchat in order to measure and prove its advertising effectiveness. In May 2016, Snapchat rolled out Nielsen measurement. The video app also co-operates with Moat and DoubleClick on ad measurement.

Twitter invents emoji targeting

Twitter has found a new targeting option: the platform now allows advertisers to target users on the basis of recently used emojis.

Emoji activity is seen as a barometer that indicates user interests and current occupation: Tweet the 'beer mug' emoji, and you may be shown an ad for a beverage producer.

Sounds absurd, but Twitter backs up the idea with numbers. According to the company, more than 110 billion emojis have been used on the platform since 2014.

It remains to be seen whether the new targeting option will lift Twitter from its current advertising low. And, for once, the platform is ahead of its rival: Facebook does not offer emoji targeting. Yet.

Partners for the new targeting experiment are AdParlor, Amobee, HYFN, Perion, SocialCode, and 4C.

Uber partners with Factual for data

Factual and Uber announce a new partnership: Factual's database that compiles details such as phone numbers, websites, email addresses, exact location, and business hours, will be shared with transport app Uber.

Factual has the data that Uber wants – in order to provide more detailed and accurate information about locations and services that their users may be looking for. Thus, Uber will use Factual’s Global Places data to customise and enhance the pick-up and drop-off experience for riders and drivers.

What’s in it for Factual? According to the agreement, the data provider will receive edits and updates to the places generated by Uber. This, Factual hopes, will improve the quality of their database and, ultimately, benefit other clients who are using Factual data.

Factual’s Global Places data covers 95 million local businesses and points of interest in 50 countries.

Jay Stevens joins Adform

Adform announces new C-level additions to their leadership team. Starting immediately, Jay Stevens will take on the role of chief revenue officer at the ad tech provider. New chief operating officer Oliver Whitten joins Adform in August, the company revealed. Both Stevens and Whitten will report directly to Adform CEO, Gustav Mellentin.

In his new role, Stevens will be responsible for driving global revenue across all markets, including Europe, the US, Asia Pacific, and Latin America. Whitten will be at the helm of global commercial operations, responsible for the business in Europe, as well as global client service, operations, and business development.

Both Stevens and Whitten join Adform from Rubicon Project, where Stevens served as GM and Whitten held a position as EMEA SVP and managing director.

Stevens left Rubicon Project at the beginning of March 2016.