As Rakuten Marketing looks to spread its net across an even greater breadth of the digital landscape, the company has announced yet another purchase – that of Silicon Valley firm Deep Forest.

The acquired asset is a provider of mobile marketing solutions, offering a full-stack ad platform which enables programmatic buying across various channels and devices. 

Deep Forest’s technology also enables advertisers to personalise their messaging at key touchpoints, with features that allow for user segmentation and hyper-local targeting among others.      

The demand-side platform aside, Rakuten Marketing was drawn to a purchase by Deep Forest’s proprietary tracking and optimisation tech, which could fit in with some of the developments at its Attribution and Display wings. Reports suggest Deep Forest could even benefit from being in sync with Rakuten’s e-commerce data, allowing for the targeting of shoppers across devices.

Tony Zito, CEO at Rakuten Marketing, highlighted that mobile commerce is set to hit $298 billion this year and has backed Deep Forest to help his firm strengthen in this capacity. 

Building strength in mobile

Rakuten Marketing says its future commitments are in driving what it calls the “omni-experience”, or the act of building marketing around consumer experiences to improve cross-channel performance. 

With an increasing number of consumers choosing to purchase and research products on their mobile devices, Naghi Prasad, founder and CEO at Deep Forest, believes his firm will provide Rakuten with the perfect fit. 

“Rakuten Marketing has a bold, customer-centric vision for the future of omni-channel marketing and we could not have found a better home for our team and technology,” he commented. 

“With the synergies between our technologies and Rakuten data, we are poised to have the kind of impact on the market that will change the way we think about the consumer journey and how to optimise it.”

Utilising assets

While Rakuten Marketing has set its sights on being able to use Deep Forest to improve engagement with consumers, the former sees clear benefits in being able to use the latter’s mobile technology for strengthening its Display arm. 

Since splitting its departments last year, Rakuten Marketing offers dedicated units for services under Display, Attribution, Search and Affiliate.  

The group has also made a significant change in its boardroom; promoting Zito to CEO earlier this month.