Microsoft’s LinkedIn business has recently announced the acquisition of Drawbridge Inc, a digital identity management vendor. The deal amount has not been disclosed yet. Microsoft has been planning to use Drawbridge’s technology to strengthen marketing solutions product of LinkedIn, cites source. Reportedly, Microsoft’s plan is to get assistance from Drawbridge to help LinkedIn users to reach their audience better & measure the return on investment (ROI) of their campaigns across desktop & mobile. Since Microsoft acquired LinkedIn, it allowed LinkedIn to grow than integrate the company & its products into Microsoft’s fold. Founded in 2011, Drawbridge Inc. developed a people-based identity graph & cross-device advertising platform that pioneers in using large-scale Artificial Intelligence and machine learning to match users across connected devices, such as- smartphones, tablets, desktops & connected televisions, in order to distribute more relevant ads across devices. For instance, the activity a user is engaged in a laptop, could influence the ads on the user’s smartphone. It enables brands to better target their ads and messaging. For the record, Drawbridge determines whether two devices are used by the same person or not, by analyzing events occurring on the device & yielding attributes of those events. It primarily observes user’s activities through proxy of ads served to devices like mobile or desktop web, which provides them with an ID. Since IDs are dissimilar across all the devices the user may have interacted with, this allows Drawbridge to compute confidence-score on the basis of the probability that IDs from different sources relate to same person. As per credible source, Drawbridge has a collection of entities or graphs, like other parts of Microsoft. Drawbridge’s graphs are devised to help users connect to their marketing platforms, authentication tools, personalization systems and more. Presently, the company is listed among its integration partners- Oracle, Adobe & Salesforce. In 2018, Gimbal, a marketing and advertising automation platform company announced to have purchased the managed media component of Drawbridge. The deal amount was kept undisclosed. Source credits: https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-acquires-drawbridge-to-bolster-linkedins-marketing-platform/