Unified’s acquisition of awe.sm made headlines across the industry last week along with AOL’s and Google’s acquisition announcements of attribution technologies.  The advertising industry is huge, with nearly $600 billion projected to be spent by 2016 and $170 billion to be spent in digital.  When marketers are spending money at this scale, it’s incredibly important that they be able to manage attribution effectively across all channels.

Of the $170 billion in future digital ad spend, social and mobile are the two fastest growing categories with each experiencing over 20% annual growth rates (display annual growth rate 6%, search annual growth rate 13%). A driving factor for this growth can be contributed to hypergrowth of social mobile users.  In fact, Facebook recently reported that they have exceeded 1 billion monthly active users on phones and tablets. As a result of this shift to mobile, content consumption is migrating to the newsfeed faster than ever and marketers are now required to optimize campaigns for social success, including TV, search and email.

In addition to the social and mobile growth, CMOs are demanding more ROI from their campaign initiatives and are requiring marketing intelligence to make better business decisions. One of the biggest challenges in digital, including social, is effectively tracking and measuring attribution. It’s reported that over 50% of all social referrals/sharing occurs outside of social networks and has essentially been invisible and unmeasurable.

awe.sm has built one of the most comprehensive toolsets available to help marketers attribute, measure and track conversion events anywhere across digital. awe.sm’s social attribution engine tracks conversion events such as purchases, comments, product interactions, event registrations, lead-form completions, referrals, or sharing a link with others via email, text message, or social media.  awe.sm’s technology also proves the true impact of multiple generations of sharing even outside of the social networks.

The integration of awe.sm’s attribution technology into our Social Operating Platform means that CMOs will get visibility into the full value of social sharing for the first time. With the addition of awe.sm’s powerful toolset, Unified’s Social Operating Platform now gives marketers visibility into powerful customer activity that accounts for over 50% of social referrals.

This transaction is an important step for Unified, and it will deliver huge value to an industry that can now prove that social behavior is driving success across social, mobile, digital, and offline marketing channels. I’m very excited about awe.sm and how it fits into Unified’s vision.