But, lately, legislation and tech vendors’ own policy changes mean this super-power is drying up.

Now, it is becoming more commonplace for brands to collect, store and use their own data about their own customers and prospects.

After Acxiom sold its own data warehouse business, the former LiveRamp, to InterPublic Group last year, the reconstituted LiveRamp, following its acquisition of Data Plus Math, now wants to help the industry in a different way.

“We live in a world of massive fragmentation and that fragmentation is only increasing over time,” says CEO Scott Howe. “Virtually every major advertiser has built their own CRM file and their own sense of identity with each of their consumers.

“Increasingly we’re seeing that on the major publisher side as well. They’re not relying on any intermediary to provide that identity rather they’re going out and they’re collecting first party permission. They’re doing a value exchange with their consumers.

“And so, in a world where there are thousands of different identities it’s so important for an agnostic, neutral, seamless provider to link those all together in a permission based way.”

LiveRamp recently acquired Boston-based Data Plus Math, whose technology helps match up audience profiles and map ad exposure to conversion activities.

Data Plus Math works when marketers add its “TV Pixel” to their websites or apps. The company links tracked in-app or on-web activity to ad exposure data from millions of US homes, effectively supporting attributing ad views to website or checkout conversions.

This video is part of a series of interviews conducted during Advertising Week New York, 2019.  This series is co-production of Beet.TV and Advertising Week.   The series is sponsored by Roundel, a Target company.  Please see more videos from Advertising Week right here. 

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.

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.

“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.