What's Verizon after in its acquisition of AOL?

You likely heard the news yesterday that Verizon is seeking to acquire AOL for $4.4 billion dollars. And like me, you may have asked "AOL is still a thing and it's worth that much?" or "AOL owns The Huffington Post?" But it quickly became clear what this deal was about - that's right, advertising - and programmatic buying at that.

Verizon expressed interest in the ad targeting capabilities that AOL has developed across their network of sites. With their huge market of customers and the data that comes with it, combining with AOL's ad tech platform makes perfect sense. This will help when Verizon launches its recently announced mobile/over-the-top (OTT) video service later this year; supporting that through ads just became a whole lot easier. As this article notes "With the deal, AOL and Verizon can jointly solve issues related to measurement of ad metrics and targeting." All of this makes "Shingy" AOL's digital prophet happy. 

So why should this news make marketers happy? Well, it means smarter targeting utilizing Verizon's data and customer base. More advertising options beyond Google and Facebook as well - and more competition is always good. Plus it means this space of mobile/OTT video is only going to get more programmatic. 

What was your reaction to this news yesterday? Share in the comments.