Alliant has announced the acquisition of data insights and analytics firm AnalyticsIQ to expand its audience platform. The deal, funded by Alliant’s parent company Inverness Graham—a private equity firm that acquired Alliant in November—was not disclosed financially.
Following the acquisition, AnalyticsIQ CEO Scarlett Shipp will become Alliant’s new CEO. The current CEO, JoAnne Monfradi Dunn, will retire from daily operations and join the board of directors to oversee the transition and support future acquisitions.
Alliant plans to integrate AnalyticsIQ’s audience modeling platform, which relies on surveys and studies in health, wellness, and cognitive psychology. This data enhances Alliant’s existing purchase history data by predicting consumer behavior and future buying patterns.
The combined company will develop a unified audience graph combining AnalyticsIQ’s behavioral and cognitive signals with Alliant’s transactional data and deterministic user IDs. Both companies will operate independently during the integration phase.
Monfradi Dunn said Inverness Graham’s strategy is to build Alliant by acquiring scalable data companies, with AnalyticsIQ being the initial step. She noted Shipp met all criteria for the CEO role, while AnalyticsIQ was a fitting acquisition target.
Shipp highlighted that AnalyticsIQ’s wellness and psychological audience data complements Alliant’s substantial transaction database. For example, sleep quality surveys could help target sleep aid ads or optimize ad timing for late-night viewers on connected TV.
Combining audience graphs and machine learning will provide advertisers with enhanced scalability and sophisticated audience modeling. This approach addresses growing demand for probabilistic modeling amid declining availability of deterministic data due to user opt-outs and platform restrictions on third-party cookies and device IDs.
Alliant supports alternative IDs like The Trade Desk’s UID2 and LiveRamp’s RampID for audience matching instead of relying on third-party cookies.
Initially, Alliant will focus on near-term growth by merging the companies’ portfolios and expanding client services. Longer term, deeper integrations with advertising platforms are expected.
The combined workforce will increase by about 60 employees from AnalyticsIQ, adding to Alliant’s existing 90 staff. Some role redundancies may be addressed, with growth prioritized in sales support. Cross-training of sales teams and expanding client relationships are key initiatives.
Additionally, Alliant is exploring the launch of an agentic AI solution to provide audience recommendations using its enhanced data. While further acquisitions remain possible, both executives emphasize that integration of Alliant and AnalyticsIQ is currently the priority.