Swedish startup turns a partnership into acquisition to enhance marketing intelligence

Funnel, a Stockholm-based marketing intelligence platform, has acquired Hamburg’s marketing measurement company Adtriba. This strategic acquisition enhances Funnel’s product offering by integrating Adtriba’s advanced marketing analytics and Unified Marketing Measurement (UMM) capabilities. The merger aims to strengthen Funnel’s position in the global marketing intelligence market, leveraging Adtriba’s AI-powered measurement technology to offer more precise and comprehensive marketing insights.

Adtriba’s software will be fully incorporated into Funnel’s platform, providing customers with an integrated solution that combines marketing mix modeling, multi-touch attribution, and incrementality testing methodologies. The acquisition ensures that both companies’ operations in Sweden and Germany will continue seamlessly, with Adtriba’s team joining Funnel’s product division and maintaining their Hamburg office. This move marks a significant step towards delivering robust marketing intelligence to a broader range of businesses.

At a time when it is becoming increasingly complicated to collect, analyze and measure marketing data from online and offline channels, this acquisition strengthens the sophistication of Funnel’s marketing insights. Funnel’s thousands of customers will be provided with a market-first integrated measurement technology, based on Adtriba’s capabilities, within one unified platform.

Marketing is often a company’s biggest investment, and yet many elements of advertising campaign effectiveness remain intangible and unquantifiable to the marketers who design them. Working with the likes of Adidas, Sony, FlixBus and Samsung, Funnel and Adtriba’s combined solution accurately identifies the impact of budgetary spend and campaign ROI through an AI-powered model that triangulates marketing mix modelling (MMM), multi-touch attribution (MTA) and incrementality testing methodologies.

In 2021, the marketing attribution software market was valued at $3.1 billion, boosted by the expansion of online marketing channels and emerging technologies such as cloud computing and AI-powered solutions. Growing at a CAGR of 15.5% from 2022 to 2031, the market is projected to reach $12.9 billion by 2031.

Founded in Stockholm in 2014, Funnel has grown to over 300 employees and is trusted by globally recognized brands such as Home Depot and Uber, as well as agency clients across B2B and B2C like Publicis and Havas. Data gleaned from every marketing channel, from Google Ads to LinkedIn, Salesforce to Facebook Ads, is collated and presented across easy-to-use dashboards in Funnel’s Data Hub to support companies with the gathering, reporting and exporting of information.

Hamburg-headquartered Adtriba has grown to 18 employees since launching in 2015 and has been used by multinational companies like FlixBus and Montblanc for data-driven marketing measurement and optimization across all channels.

In the coming months, Adtriba’s software will be fully incorporated into Funnel’s platform, creating an integrated marketing intelligence platform for measurement and ‘triangulation’ through blending MMM, MTA and incrementality testing methodologies. Combining these methodologies is the best way to measure marketing activities accurately and to determine what is working and why. With more businesses shifting from pure performance marketing to holistic full-funnel approaches, it is crucial to track marketing spending impact, particularly in the upper funnel.

Measurement has been largely inaccessible to companies due to its perceived cost, complexity, and lack of real-time updates. Restrictions on third-party cookies, privacy and data collection on iOS and Android, and relying on last-click tracking have all made measuring more difficult. By integrating Adtriba’s proprietary, machine-learning-powered measurement technology into Funnel’s Marketing Intelligence platform, measurement becomes faster, more affordable, and more accurate, removing barriers to entry for marketers. This holistic marketing measurement, referred to as UMM, is at the forefront of data analytics and has previously been restricted to larger enterprises.

Owing to Funnel and Adtriba’s multi-year partnership that predates this deal, the acquisition is a natural step towards the delivery of a robust solution for existing and future customers, providing a strong and technologically sound value-add.

As before, the workforces at both companies will continue their activity in Sweden and Germany respectively. Adtriba’s employees will contribute to the Funnel product team and maintain their Hamburg office, and the marketing and sales teams will merge. Both companies’ existing customers will be shared after this acquisition without disrupting Funnel and Adtriba’s product offerings.

Fredrik Skantze, CEO of Funnel, says: “It is one thing to offer clients data and information about their marketing spend; it is quite another to give them marketing intelligence. Add to this Adtriba’s proprietary, world-class measurement technology and this is a very powerful tool for marketers. At Funnel, we are bold in wanting to be the definitive Marketing Intelligence Platform. Through this acquisition, we are well on the way to achieving that goal. If our previous partnership with Adtriba is any indication, I am more than confident this deal will be a success. We are pleased to be welcoming Adtriba’s team to Funnel and we cannot wait to begin the integration of our technologies.”

As soon as this fall, Funnel’s Marketing Intelligence platform will be greatly enhanced by Adtriba’s solution, expanding the scope for what brands can do with their marketing budgets and offering solution partners a broader, more deeply integrated platform.

Adtriba CEO János Moldvay — who will become VP of Measurement at Funnel — adds, “As Adtriba continues to compete in the measurement technology arena, we are thrilled to announce this next step in our journey. Measurement platforms are dependent on accurate, and timely data that shows a complete picture, something that is out of reach for many businesses in our space. However, through our previous partnership with Funnel, we identified their Data Hub as a key differentiator for our measurement product. By integrating Adtriba into Funnel’s Marketing Intelligence platform, Adtriba will more effectively compete in the measurement market and access a large base of data-driven companies at the top of their game.”

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