Verizon is continuing their ‘shopping spree’ with a recently announced deal to buy the GPS vehicle-tracking company, Fleetmatics Group. This Ireland based company is the latest purchase, announced about a week after the announcement that they were buying Yahoo for $4.8 billion. Interestingly, this company that is far less well known is being purchased at a value of about $2.4 billion, half as much as the iconic Yahoo.
Verizon has been looking at different ways to diversify their core business of telecommunications services, and this seems to be just one more big move in that direction. In addition to using the technologies and services in place by Fleetmatics, Verizon may be able to use some of the data they can gather to help further improve their marketing efforts.
Verizon’s purchase of Yahoo, and AOL a year ago position them very well to directly compete with Facebook and Google for advertising. Having another source of user information (Fleetmatics) will make their targeting even stronger. Of course, whether or not Verizon wants to or is able to harness this data for marketing is not clear yet.
While most marketers likely looked at Verizon as little more than their cell provider in the past, they are definitely a company to watch in the coming year. We can surely expect to see some major advertising options that could very well shake up the marketing industry quite significantly.
