Freckle IoT has announced a global partnership with Cisco, allowing the in-store attribution vendor to leverage Cisco’s Meraki access points and more efficiently tie brand advertising campaigns to offline visits on a global scale. As part of the new partnership, Freckle will be a member of Cisco’s Solution Partner Program.

“For a brand that is operating internationally, we can measure offline attribution for them in any country that they are in,” explains Freckle’s founder and CEO Neil Sweeney. “It also means that for these major brands, the deployment of hardware is now seamless, as they are able to leverage pre-existing infrastructure that is in their store.”

That ability to leverage pre-existing infrastructure makes for what Sweeney describes as “frictionless execution,” and it’s one of the ways that Freckle is looking to differentiate itself in the crowded offline attribution market. Sweeney says that Freckle is aiming to become a global leader in attribution, in the same way that Moat, Integral Ad Science, and Double Verify have become leaders in viewability.

“Intuitively we believe that the industry is moving to a attribution first metric, not some of the metrics that exist today such as viewability and CTR,” he says. “There are ways in which to track online attribution, but the industry lacks a holistic voice for offline.”

Rather than relying on inferences for attribution, Freckle is directly tying opted-in consumers to store visits. The company uses data directly from smartphone handsets and marries it with brands’ global advertising campaigns to show whether specific advertising messages directly result in visits to a business. Read more