Dive Brief:

• Rakuten Marketing, the marketing unit of Japanese e-commerce company Rakuten, has announced the acquisition of Manifest Commerce, a product intelligence company. 
• The deal will improve Rakuten's ability to optimize prospecting and retargeting advertising campaigns across social media platforms.
• The deal gives Rakuten access to Manifest’s API-based technology, which expands Rakuten’s programmatic inventory advertising options to both DSP platforms and API interfaces.

Dive Insight:

Rakuten expects to improve ad performance and ROI across its omnichannel offerings by integrating Manifest’s technology. Manifest’s technology uses predictive marketing and optimization engines to introduce new products to relevant audience segments in an automated process that selects and tests products that are likely to perform well. The technology takes the data from the testing to dynamically optimize ads that are presented to a larger audience.

“The proportion of marketing investment into social continues to grow rapidly, yet the role consumer behavior and insights play in the purchase journey is still in its infancy, and there are huge opportunities in optimizing with product intelligence,” Tony Zito, CEO of Rakuten Marketing, said in a statement. “As this acquisition shows, Rakuten Marketing is at the forefront of dynamic ad technology and committed to offering native solutions that maximize performance for our customers.”