Any­one hold­ing media jobs in online adver­tis­ing agen­cies, from art direc­tors to account man­agers, will know that, in the era of dig­i­tal adver­tis­ing, cre­ative tal­ent and sound data need to be joined at the hip. That is per­haps why New York’s ris­ing data and mar­ket­ing start-up Nomi has just acquired cross-device ad tar­get­ing start-up Media Armor.

Dig­i­tiz­ing the offline world

Nomi’s mis­sion since its launch in 2012 has been to, “dig­i­tize the offline world to be on par with the online world”: it brings its tech­nol­o­gy and tal­ent to bricks and mor­tar retail­ers, pro­vid­ing them with the data they need to be as opti­mized as an ecom­merce site. By exploit­ing data that already exists, it can show them not only how suc­cess­ful mar­ket­ing cam­paigns have been in ramp­ing up in-store traf­fic, but how much of that traf­fic actu­al­ly ends up mak­ing pur­chas­es. Nomi’s tech­nol­o­gy nifti­ly inte­grates data about cus­tomers across mobile, the web and in stores, giv­ing retail­ers a full pic­ture of what they’re doing and what they’re inter­est­ed in.

In Octo­ber last year, Nomi suc­cess­ful­ly raised Series A invest­ment amount­ing to $10 mil­lion, much of which was ploughed into its engi­neer­ing and prod­uct teams. But it’s had its sights on Media Armor for some time. Nomi CEO Marc Fer­renti­no had been impressed with its cross-device retar­get­ing capa­bil­i­ties, and says that the acqui­si­tion will help his com­pa­ny bring addi­tion­al dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing data to its platform.

A fruit­ful integration?

By jux­ta­pos­ing Media Armor’s capa­bil­i­ties with Nomi’s iBea­con inte­gra­tion, for exam­ple, Nomi will be able to tell cloth­ing retail­ers if an in-store cus­tomer had pre­vi­ous­ly placed any items in his or her online shop­ping cart, and then allow the store to send tar­get­ed mobile mes­sages to that cus­tomer based on that data. As Fer­renti­no puts it: “Ulti­mate­ly, it’s not about e‑commerce or in-store com­merce, it’s just commerce.”

No finan­cial terms have been dis­closed yet but we do know that Media Armor’s four-strong team is upping sticks from Boston to join the Nomi team at its New York office. Media Armor’s co-founders, Eric Brown and Eliz­a­beth Zal­man will take on the roles of direc­tor of prod­uct man­age­ment and VP of insights respec­tive­ly upon step­ping aboard the good ship Nomi.