So brands and publishers alike are having to pivot to gaining first-party data on audiences.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Kyle Hollaway, Acxiom VP and head of global identity, says that means they are going to have to learn to deliver attractive value to users, if those users are to hand over personal information.
“It’s really about the value exchange,” Hollaway says. “Previously, consumers were left out of the value exchange. Their information was being shared directly between advertisers and platforms. And now there’s this injection of the consumer into the middle of that.
“In other words, for you as a consumer, what are you going to get in return for sharing some of your personal information?
“Now, in many cases that is still about getting contextualised or personalised, offers or information. I think everyone still has that desire to be known and appreciates being known and having more of a one-to-one relationship, but it actually puts more power in the consumer’s hands to really evaluate that value exchange and say, is this worth it to me?”
Google plans to sunset third-party cookies, which help marketers swap parts of users’ profiles, by 2022. Apple has turned location tracking and its IDFA opt-in by default. Those moves follow GDPR and CCPA.
All of which poses a challenge – but also an opportunity.
Many believe such technologies were never really foolproof ways of understanding audience identity. Moving forward, if they can successfully develop a relationship, they can also capture a real identity, something which can move with users across platforms.
“With these new events coming to play within the market, the need to really master your own data, understand your consumers (and) prospects and have data that is in a brand’s control,” Hollaway adds.
He sees 2021 as embedding a prior year that was all about learnings.
Indeed, 2020 felt like a year when many companies got to grips with the emerging identity challenge.
“Everyone has this anticipation that it’s time to act,” Hollaway says.
“In 2021, you’re going to see people taking a lot more active role now that they’ve educated, really evaluated the market and understand what options they have.”
You are watching “First Party Data: Driving Media Investment and Accountability,” a Beet.TV leadership video series presented by Target’s Roundel For more videos, please visit this page. The views shared on this series do not necessarily reflect the opinion of Target and Roundel.
]]>At the foundation of the response to a cookie-less future, consent and PII data are going to be important.
“You see some of the acquisitions happening where publishers are acquiring the programmatic platforms, the ad tech platforms, so they can have the full stack, and they can manage the people and the consent that they get on there,” Baudino says.
This will be important because these publishers are going to need to own it and know what regulations are coming next. Being proactive in this sense will make things like fragmentation within the industry less of a pressing issue. Being reactive to it, however, will make fragmentation harder to handle.
“You have to have that awareness and a plan for each market and what they’re going to do and be able to operate at data levels that fit each of those markets.” Baudino said. “As long as you have privacy as your foundation and how you build your data and your products and your capabilities, then you should be prepared to handle all situations.”
As far as growth opportunities for the next few years, Baudino believes that connecting digital data in the core marketing and connecting those two worlds together, using anonymous and known data, and connecting the insights that can be learned on both of those can help companies to more effectively market. Lastly, being able to do all of this globally will be a huge advantage.
“In the global markets, they’re going to accelerate their desire to be people-based, and you have to help educate them and understand what’s the investment and be able to give them a good, better, best approach, and consult.” Baudino said. “That’s what we’re finding—there’s a lot of consulting education still happening in the market, and if you’re willing to put in that effort, then you’re going to really support those brands and those platforms that want to listen.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of RampUp, LiveRamp’s summit for marketing technology in San Francisco. This series is co-sponsored by LiveRamp and ZEFR.
]]>But that’s what ad-tech Acxiom – a data warehouse firm that sells consumer profiles to the world’s largest companies, available to advertisers and ad-tech platforms for advanced customer targeting – is doing when it is due to complete the sale of its Acxiom Marketing Solutions (AMS) division to the Interpublic Group (IPG) agency today.
The deal leaves Acxiom focusing on LiveRamp, which is more fixed on letting brands use their own customer data in ad targeting than just buying in consumer data sets.
After two years in which both agencies and tech vendors have been accused of a host of misdeeds, LiveRamp CEO Scott Howe says the sell-off means: “We’re now absolutely completely neutral.”
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Howe says: “(We are) now going to be armed with a really attractive balance sheet, which is going to allow us to accelerate innovation at LiveRamp, go win more clients, do more integrations.”
Acxiom has faced challenges. Earlier this year, Facebook said it would shut Partner Categories, through which it allowed advertisers to target ads using customer profiles bought from data brokers like Acxiom. Meanwhile, Europe’s GDPR has introduced more stringent controls on the levels of consent required to process consumer data in this way.
Now Howe is focusing on letting marketers unleash the power within the customer data they already have, rather than just buying in customer data segments to stitch together.
“To make every experience relevant … you need to activate those interactions with consumers with data,” he says. “But, for too long it’s been just too difficult to do. There was no easy button for activating data.
“What LiveRamp has done is, they’ve gone and integrated all of the world’s data providers, linked that data to all of the world’s people, and then in turn, link that to built connections to all of the world’s use cases.”
That goes even for TV advertising, as LiveRamp enables the use of marketer data in addressable, OTT and linear ad campaigns.
AMS’ sale to IPG comes in at $2.3 billion, for which IPG just raised $2 billion. The exercise has pleased some financial analysts, who see the move as facilitating a stock performance that has grown despite what some saw as threats early in 2018.
And Howe is keen to stress the new Acxiom understands the importance of privacy.
“At both Acxiom and LiveRamp, we are huge proponents of having federal privacy legislation,” he says. “At the heart of all privacy legislation is an intent to be transparent with consumers, ensure that data is ethically sourced, and give people better visibility and control over how their data is utilized. That’s a good thing. It’s a good thing for businesses, it’s a good thing for consumers.”
This video is part of a series leading up to, and covering the Xandr Relevance Conference in Santa Barbara. For more videos from the series, please visit this page. This Beet.TV program is sponsored by Xandr, a unit of AT&T.
]]>“The genesis behind the comScore-Rentrak merger was brilliant,” Wiener says in this interview with Beet.TV. “What we haven’t done well is integrate those two platforms and provide rapid product innovation to the market, and that’s really what we’re doing with this resurgent comScore.”
At AT&T’s upcoming The Relevance Conference later this month, Wiener will participate in a panel discussion of industry executives titled The ROI of Attention. He believes the conference comes at an appropriate time.
“I think we’re at this point in time where the industry needs to evolve pretty rapidly and, one of the core elements of that is how do we measure audiences and how do we measure advertising ROI,” Wiener says.
Wiener joined comScore in April of 2018, having been a board member since the previous fall. He was tasked with righting the comScore ship following a string of accounting crises and losses, as the Wall Street Journal reports. In his first 60 days at comScore he had more than that number of customer meetings in which he heard “over and over again” the desire from buyers and sellers for reliable, third-party measurement of audiences and advertising ROI.
“And that’s something that the current state is not doing very well and I think that’s our big opportunity.” comScore has laid out “an aggressive road map over the next six months of launching products that are going to solve that need,” says Wiener.
“That primary need is unduplicated reach and frequency in this cross-platform world. We’re going to start with currency products, but we’re going to move on to planning products.”
To Wiener, being “relevant” is table stakes for convincing people to buy something. “This entire industry is based on growing marketers’ business. I think people sometimes lose sight of that. At the end of the day, marketing is not about marketing. Marketing’s about fueling profitable growth for marketers. If that’s happening that creates a virtuous cycle for everybody in the ecosystem.”
At the AT&T event, Wiener will be joined on stage by Scott Howe, CEO, Acxiom; Peter Naylor, SVP Ad Sales, Hulu; and Donna Speciale, President, Advertising Sales, Turner. It will be moderated by AppNexus President Michael Rubenstein.
This video is part of a series leading up to and documenting the AT&T Relevance Conference in Santa Barbara. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Acxiom is a data warehouse firm that sells consumer profiles to the world’s largest companies, available to advertisers and ad-tech platforms for advanced customer targeting.
In one big challenge, Facebook said it would shut Partner Categories, through which it allowed advertisers to target ads using customer profiles bought from data brokers like Acxiom. In another, Europe’s GDPR on May 25 introduces more stringent controls on the levels of consent required to process consumer data in this way.
But Acxiom CEO Scott Howe says he sees the silver lining.
“Consumer privacy is an important issue, for the entire industry,” Howe says in this video interview with Beet.TV. “But, it’s also an incredible opportunity.
“When we ask consumers their opinion, it’s amazing. Far more of them want to offer up their favorite brands, information about themselves, in an effort to have better experiences, and cultivate better relationships with the companies that they love, than want to opt out.
“What they don’t have, and what the industry needs to provide them, is increased visibility, and increased choice about how that information is used.”
Howe says he hopes to see methods that make consumers’ data-for-services trade-off an automatic expectation.
He says that would lead to better-quality information about customers and better consumer experiences in return.
So what about GDPR? The new European legislation introduces a host of new rights for consumers over the way their personal data is harvested, stored and processed, including a strict requirement that they must explicitly opt in for such things.
The new limits threaten to curtail some of the advanced ad targeting practices that have grown up around programmatic in the last five years. But Howe is trying to see the positives.
“GDPR is the first step in a journey,” he says. “And ultimately, what GDPR really accomplishes is, it gives consumers more visibility, and more choice.”
More than that, Howe expects similar policy to come ashore in the US – and he is actually advocating it applies in all states.
“We’re going to start to see GDPR type regulation occur here in the United States,” Howe continues. “We’re seeing that with the California ballot initiative. There are a variety of other initiatives contemplated at the state level.
“The intent behind each one of those legislations is good, it’s about visibility, choice, control. What I’d like to see is, rather than deal with a patchwork of individual state legislation, that we elevate the discussion to the federal level, and really try to land on a one-size-fits-all framework, such that we don’t have to deal with the tax created from 50 different states but, instead, deal with a uniform law, that spans all states.”
This video was recorded at the annual DMS conference presented by LUMA Partners.
This video is part of a series titled The Consumer First, a New Era in Digital Media presented by MediaMath. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>“There’s a lot of untapped opportunity in TV,” says LiveRamp Co-CEO Anneka Gupta. “It’s not very measureable.”
The IdentityLink extension was announced to coincide with RampUp 2018, the LiveRamp conference that attracted nearly 3,000 attendees in its six year of existence–up from 300 at the beginning.
In this interview with Beet.TV, Gupta talks about the industry changes that need to take place to free up more TV ad time for addressable campaigns and why it’s a win-win for different kinds of companies to exchange second-party data.
While LiveRamp and its parent company Acxiom have offered some TV solutions in the past couple of years, extending IdentityLink to TV is about “greater innovation and investment in the TV space. We now have a much larger dedicated group focused on this area,” says Gupta. IdentityLink for TV connects customer-based identities across channels by linking advertiser data with trusted third-party and TV viewership data.
LiveRamp is working to automate some of its existing addressable TV capabilities to make it easier for marketers to run such campaigns. It’s also looking beyond address to the broader TV market, including linear and OTT, “trying to work with the entire industry to make TV solutions and make TV advertising a lot more measureable and a lot more addressable.”
Gupta discusses working with MVPD’s to help brands target specific households with TV ads, for example retailers that want to reach consumers who have made purchases from them in the past six months.
“We can now take that audience of people, map it to the subscribers for each of these MVPD’s and actually run targeted ads to specific households that have those members of the audience in it,” Gupta explains. Instead of generic product messages, targeted viewers see ads “very specific to them and actually related to their experience and relationship with that brand already.”
She believes the industry must undergo an evolution encompassing technology, business organization structures, and business development relations that need to be spawned to open up more addressable beyond the two minutes of local time allotted to most MVPD’s.
“It’s not going to be just a twelve-month journey. It’s going to be a multi-year journey that we’re on together,” Gupta says.
LiveRamp would like to widen the participation of companies in the exchanging of second-party data to drive value for their respective businesses. “It can be a real win-win when you bring together complementary data sets to influence consumer interaction and make more personalized experiences,” Gupta says.
This video is part of a series produced in San Francisco at the RampUp 2018 conference. The series is sponsored by Alphonso. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>“About six months ago, I would say that perhaps the industry had not really had a moment of reckoning yet,” says Acxiom chief data ethics officer Sheila Colclasure in this video interview with Beet.TV. “I think that moment’s come.”
GDPR came in to effect back in 2016, updating prior consumer data protection rules in a significant way. Now any global company which deals with EU citizens’ data must comply with a new and more stringent set of demands, chiefly tighter consent conditions for citizens’ data to be collected. Breaching the new rules risks incurring a fine of up to 4% of global annual turnover, up to a maximum of €20 million.
“I don’t think our industry has ever had this level of accountability codified into law,” Colclasure adds. “We are all going to have to think about … our data governance practices, quite specifically in standing up programs to govern all that data.”
The GDPR gives consumers new powers including to request decisioning by automated processes be stopped and handled by a human instead – something which could pose a big theoretical challenge to advertising technology operators.
“For our industry, for digital ad-tech, the consent mechanism was somewhat favorable or we thought it was until the guidance came out. Now it is so specified that it’s a challenge for us,” Colclasure says.
So how does her Acxiom intend to comply with the new law?
“It’s hard to do, especially on the small screen mobile,” she concedes. “It’s hard, but the consent mechanism is quite specified – it has to be validated, you have to have some sort of logging mechanism upon inspection (so that) you can demonstrate that you’ve achieved affirmative consent.”
But the changes are broader than that, and they will have a more profound impact than simply requiring paperwork.
“Now we have to think about privacy by design,”Colclasure adds. “The data protection has to be built in at the engineering layer. This is very different. We all have to stand up data governance programs in the design layer with an eye to the impact to the data subject or the individual consumer.
“There’s many other parts to the law, of course. There’s ninety-nine different articles in GDPR. We all have to at least evaluate our businesses against each of the articles and determine which ones apply and then how they apply and how we’re going to accommodate them.”
This video is part of our series on the preparation and anticipated impact GDPR on the digital media world. The series is presented by Criteo. Please visit this page for additional segments.
]]>For companies more used to selling the context of their content to advertisers, the hot new possibility – in the over-the-top TV era – is to instead sell individual viewers, thanks to the myriad data points on offer.
But which are the most viable revenue opportunities, and which choices should distributors leave on the table?
In this panel debate convened at the Beet Retreat, executives from several publishers and distributors weighted up how they tackle the wealth of new options available.
NBCUniversal sales and strategy EVP Mike Rosen:
“I like the word ‘balance’. The culture of our company should be about content-plus-audience. We’re not abandoning content. We don’t want to go to our agencies, our advertisers, and make them choose between the two.
“We sort of see that balance, where, yes, you’re going to sponsor some shows, because your brand belongs there. But, at the same token, there may be other strategies that involve looking across our entire portfolio, and finding the audiences. The two, I think will coexist for a really long time.”
Fox Networks Group Senior Vice President of Advertising Data and Technology Solutions Noah Levine:
“A year ago, I was very digitally focused. I’m very convergence focused right now. My team is probably spending about 70% of its time focused on linear. My team focuses on audience, and programmatic solutions across linear, addressable, set top box VOD, and digital.
“A lot of my time, and my leadership’s time, is spent socializing these concepts internally, getting buy-in, developing excitement around these initiatives, because part of our job is to be disruptors, to say, ‘Hey, we’ve been using age, gender as a way to guarantee for very long time’.”
Acxiom VP, Television Partner Development, Craig Berkley:
“I think most of the organizations in traditional TV are aware that this needs to happen, that we need to move towards addressable, and audience based buying, and incorporate all of these into our platforms. Different organizations are in different stages in accomplishing that internally.”
Oath Business Lead, Advanced TV, Brett Hurwitz:
“I kind of go through work each day, wondering ‘What are the obstacles’? There’s obstacles, I think, on the supply side. I think there’s obstacles on the demand side. I think we have to, as an industry, as leaders in the industry, really start breaking down those issues, and tackling them one by one, because I think the evolution is happening remarkably slowly.
“I think traditional linear television delivery has a certain amount of life ahead of it. It doesn’t make sense to me that money is still being spent the old way.”
A+E ad sales president Mel Berning:
“We have all sorts of balls up in the air right now. We would all prefer to get to a world where we’re talking about (advertising) outcomes.
“Until clients, agencies, and all of us are able to get into a real dialogue about what is the right metric to gage the effectiveness of the medium, I think we’re in a difficult spot.”
The panel was moderated by MediaLink A+E managing director Matt Spiegel.
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>LiveRamp has long been active in the digital space, using both personally identifiable and anonymous information from device ID’s and cookies to provide a single identity graph—for people or households—across all platforms. Acxiom, meanwhile, worked with pay-TV operators to create a safe haven for matching subscriber files.
“Now we have a scenario where Acxiom and LiveRamp are, in fact one company and so we have these capabilities across all of these platforms,” Craig Berkley, VP, Television Partner Development at Acxiom, says in this interview at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2017.
MVPD’s and linear TV providers use Acxiom data to inform the placement of TV commercials “by indexing the commercial viewership against the segment that the advertiser is trying to reach,” says Berkley. Addressable campaigns are done in a similar fashion.
Lacking a linear presence, OTT providers are focused on addressable video or display ads on their interfaces, “but the process from an identity perspective and from a data provisioning perspective is pretty much the same,” Berkley says.
Acxiom’s rationale for advertisers needing a single source of identity data, providing unduplicated reach among other goals, is ease and uniformity of matching.
“Otherwise, if you’re using various and sundry companies for identity in this space and identity in this space, then oftentimes you’re not going to have an accuracy across all of those,” says Berkley.
What’s the difference between omni-channel and cross-channel? Acxiom believes that “omni-channel is what cross-channel will be when it grows up.” For a full explanation, see this blog post.
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>“It’s what advertisers are looking for,” Bologna says in an interview with Beet.tv. “They night not necessarily need the data all the way down to addressability, but they could very much use the data to pick and choose their networks and programs and dayparts.”
Noting that for the longest time in TV, data has been based on broad demographic segments, “What we’re starting to see now is advertisers looking to plan their advertising based on much more granular segments, as has been identified through the digital marketplace,” Bologna explains. “But they want to do that more now in television.”
Modi typically works with some 75 different data sets, according to Bologna, and within each category one or two sets are more effective than others. “But at the end of the day, if you just take Experian and Acxiom, most of the other data sets are piped into them,” says Bologna.
While “television is still television” with the traditional GRP delivery, econometric models are improving. “We’re learning a lot from addressability, because addressability is true attribution,” says Bologna. “We’re taking the learnings that we’re getting from attribution and sales in addressability and we are starting to work on ways to project that up toward the larger business.”
A lot of the campaigns MODI is doing for clients involves targeting a specific consumer segments but not just on television. “Yes, household addressability is a piece of it. But it’s also addressing computers, mobile phones, smart TV’s, it’s addressing tablets. And it’s all being aggregated and measured together,” says Bologna.
This is happening in every product and service category, “whether it be data- infused or addressable or somewhere in between,” he adds. “We’re doing our best to tie it back to attribution, and that’s what the advertiser wants.”
We spoke with Bologna at the Future of TV Advertising Forum in London. Beet.TV’s coverage is presented by the 605. For other videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Jamie Power began to learn this about three years ago when she joined the launch of GroupM’s Modi Media advanced TV unit, now employing some 30 people. Nonetheless, it’s a challenge she’s heartily embraced.
“To be honest, it’s been the best three years of my career, it’s been so much fun,” Power says in an interview with Beet.TV. “TV is in such a transformational state, so that’s why I feel just lucky to be a part of that.”
She started with tune-in advertisers because set-top box data from MVPD’s was readily available, and then scaled the process out to categories like automotive and financial. “Even if the data set isn’t currently hooked directly with an MVPD, we can work directly with Acxiom or Experian and they can do rev share,” Power says. “So basically the answer is never no. The answer might be, ‘give me three days to let me figure out how to connect all the pieces.’”
While it’s easier to justify the cost of addressable for more expensive products or services—say, a $7 allergy medicine versus a $40,000 car—there are no limits given a proper analysis of the effective cost per thousand impressions, according to Power.
She views Modi as unique in that the background of most of its people is either in TV, strategy or research, whereas other holding companies have their digital leads heading up addressable advertising. “Our understanding is it’s TV first,” she says. “We understand it’s TV and respect that it’s TV. Now data and tech are just bringing new opportunities.”
Asked by interviewer Tim Hanlon, Founder and CEO of The Vertere Group, what would make her daily work easier, Power points to automation and standardization. “There’s definitely a need for pieces of the process to be automated. There’s definitely a need for standards. You can’t scale anything without standards,” Power says.
Nonetheless, “The future holds amazing things for addressability. We just have to connect the pieces and stay positive,” Power adds.
This interview was conducted at Beet Retreat 2016: The Transformation of Television Advertising, an executive retreat presented by Videology with AT&T AdWorks and the 605. Please find more videos from the event here.
]]>Sure, you can – but doing so takes a bit of work, according to the marketing technology company Acxiom.
“If you have the onboarding and the cookie pool to move it over deterministically and you’ve got the best identity graph in the business, it works really well,” says Eric Schmitt, Acxiom’s advanced TV advertising VP.
“An advertiser will come in with customers who visited their website and they want to bring that to television. In that case we have to do some extra work—some modelling, some analytics. ”
Acxiom expanded its addressable TV ad offering back this January, allowing advertisers to bring first- and third-party datasets to the targeting table.
“We’re able to start with either the PII base, the personal information, the name and address that we would start with in TV and match that off against our national reference file,” Schmitt adds. “And then onboard that onto cookies through our LiveRamp division, or we can start the other way with cookies, which is an emerging use case we see. ”
This interview was conducted at Beet Retreat 2016: The Transformation of Television Advertising, an executive retreat presented by Videology with AT&T AdWorks and the 605. Please find more videos from the event here.
This interview was conducted by Matter More Media CEO Tracey Scheppach.
]]>“Multiple technology platforms create multiple sources of data – lots and lots of different silos,” says Acxiom European strategy director Thaer Namruti in this video interview with Beet.TV. “With that comes the challenge of, ‘How do you architect great customer experience across a marketing ecosystem that is quite heavily siloed?
“It seems like, every year we attend DMEXCO, it becomes more and more complex. How do we connect all of that together?”
Namruti says Acxiom, the marketing technology company, aims to solve the problem by “bridging worlds” – that is, by bridging offline and online data sources.
“(Using) better targeting for paid social media – using the audience insights and information we have, to deliver to Facebook and Twitter better targeting,” he adds.
This interview is part of a series of videos leading up to the DMEXCO conference in Cologne. The series is presented by 4C Insights + Teletrax.
]]>“One of the key buzzwords that we’re going to be hearing about over and over again in the next few years; it’s about ‘connectivity’,” Acxiom CEO Scott Howe.
“The rate of innovation in our industry always exceeds the rate of consolidation. Every client, what they long for is, ‘How do I connect it all together?’ The way they can make it work together is through data. Data is the common language.”
Big data analytics company Acxiom employes over 5,000 people in 10 offices around the world and wants to help ad buyers unit disparate data sets in a single space to make buying decisions.
This video is part of series of videos covering DMEXCO. Please find all of our coverage of the show right here.
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