All posts by Experian Marketing Services

When it comes to building effective marketing campaigns, it has become increasingly important for businesses to truly understand who their consumers are in order to deliver the most relevant and timely content possible. And, with consumers accessing information across multiple channels, there is a breadth of consumer data across different devices and vendors. By accessing and analyzing these data points, marketers can paint a holistic picture of their consumers and deliver campaigns that will resonate with them. But, to tackle this challenge, marketers need to identify the right vendor and solution. That comes down to having the right tools, and Experian was recently cited in two leading analyst reports. The Forrester report, Now Tech: Identity Resolution, Q3 2018 discusses the importance of establishing an identity resolution roadmap to improve customer data management and better personalize customer interactions. Authored by analysts Joe Stanhope and Susan Bidel, and published in August 2018, the report highlights four functionality segments: onboarding, first-person PII identity, digital identity, and cross-device linking. Experian was recognized in the first person PII (personally identifiable information) identity and digital identity segments. We were also included in Gartner’s August 2018 The Gartner Marketing Technology Vendor Guide, 2018 authored by Bryan Yeager, Adam Sarner, Noah Elkin, and Benjamin Bloom. According to report, “marketing leaders can use this guide to understand the martech vendor ecosystem. Identify martech solutions and vendors capable of enhancing your customer insights and improving marketing operations, performance and outcomes.” Experian was listed as a Sample Vendor for identity resolution and for advanced analytics services. We are thrilled to be included in both reports and to help equip businesses with the solutions they need to make the best use of their data and make the right marketing decisions. Experian recently launched its MarketingConnectSM solution set, designed to help brands and marketers link together disparate systems of audience insights and engagement to foster a more seamless and personalized omni-channel customer experience. Additionally, we recently launched the Experian Marketing EngineTM to help automotive marketers better allocate marketing spend by identifying prospective car buyers more precisely and delivering content that resonates with them. Identity resolution and analytics are an important prerequisite to a campaign. With the right data and insights, you’ll reach the right consumers for your products and services at the right time. By connecting with customers on a more personal level, not only will you achieve higher ROI from your campaigns, but you’ll also increase client retention, and ultimately drive the results you need to reach your business objectives. As a proven leader in the industry, Experian is committed to helping you throughout the journey.

Lexer, the leading customer data platform for Retail and Consumer Brands have extended their 2.5 year partnership with Experian to now include ConsumerViewSM. In an industry first, Lexer’s clients now have access to Experian ConsumerView within the Lexer CDP (customer data platform) to enrich their customer data and improve marketing and customer service. This powerful data source of 300M consumers and 126M households includes household income, gender, education level, occupation, relationship status, decision making, Mosaic® segments and more. Using Lexer’s CDP, their clients can easily segment, analyze target customers and prospects with personalized communications  across mobile, online, social, email, direct mail & TV. This powerful new enrichment gives brands a comprehensive picture of each customer. “We are making Experian data accessible to brands of all sizes to gain rich customer insight and grow lifetime value through improved marketing and customer service. ” David Chinn, President - Lexer US With Lexer and Experian clients can: Gain actionable insight through enriching your customer records with the best source of demographic, financial and lifestyle data. Use the latest in AI to find and profile the best prospects from Experian’s 230M prospect records. Target customers and prospects with personalized messages at the click of button through 85 publishers. Enable customer care teams to deliver personalized customer care by presenting the enriched customer profile in every service interaction. Contact Lexer at hello@lexer.io or Experian at (877) 902- 4849 and/or experianmarketingsolutions@experian.com. ABOUT LEXER SOFTWARE FOR DATA ⚡ROCKSTARS Lexer offers a full stack of software for marketing and customer customer service teams to effortlessly understand, target, serve customers. Lexer’s market leading technology provides an easy to use interface to gain rich insight from customer data and quickly deliver personalized marketing and service at scale. Founded in 2010, Lexer have been helping clients like Qantas, Disney, Billabong and Rip Curl put their data to work to genuinely understand and engage their customers. With offices in Sydney, Melbourne, Los Angeles or New York, Lexer are ready to help you. Get in touch for more information.

When Hurricane Harvey hit the Texas Gulf Coast last summer, it affected nearly 13 million people and caused an estimated $125 billion in damages, marking the Category 4 storm as one of the costliest natural disasters in the United States. Flooding forced thousands out of their homes and into shelters, and by early September, nearly one million people registered with the Federal Emergency Management Agency for aid. In a critical time of need, we knew we wanted to help. And, we knew data and analytics could help the recovery relief efforts. We aligned with SP Group, a management consulting firm that specializes in data analytics and market research, who conducted an analysis using Experian ConsumerViewSM and CAPE data, as well as Hurricane Harvey damage data from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Using this data, SP Group assessed damage from the storm along with general economic distress, which ultimately enabled a more targeted relief approach. Having access to valuable data and economic variables was vital because it enabled SP Group to identify the neighborhoods that needed the greatest and quickest relief. The most significantly distressed neighborhoods were in Harris County, Texas, where the average household income is $25,000, whereas in the low distressed neighborhoods, the medium income was about $66,000. It turns out there was more than $372 million in housing value at risk. While we might think of data and analytics as an important tool for marketers and advertisers, it can play a pivotal role in helping others in times of need. By tracking certain metrics, major relief organizations like the Home Preservation Exchange Forum and the National Low-Income Housing Coalition were able to come together to provide thousands of people with timely help after a natural disaster. When disaster hits, analytics helps us turn our insights into action. And that’s the true meaning of data for good. Download the SP Group Case Study here.

US marketers are expected to spend roughly $100 billion on digital advertising this year, with more than half of those transactions occurring programmatically (source: eMarketer).  This growth in programmatic adoption is great news for marketers who have been clamoring for a scalable alternative to siloed data platforms in their people-based marketing initiatives.  Unfortunately, the speed with which marketing buys are transacted now often outpaces the speed with which relevant data can be delivered to buying platforms -meaning omnichannel personalization quickly devolves into rapid-fire uninformed decision-making. With that very issue top of mind, Experian is excited to announce Audience Informed Media, the first near-real-time, omnichannel audience activation platform for people-based programmatic media.  Audience Informed Media represents a shift from the traditional hub-and-spoke data activation model the industry has relied upon for the last 15 years.   Instead of syncing and syndicating cookies out to countless buy-side platforms, marketers can now manage audience targeting logic via a universal data layer that lives between their existing DSPs and publishers’ SSPs.  This framework moves both identity and attribute data closer to the point of customer interactions, eliminating lag in audience onboarding/activation times, reducing data loss, and increasing the overall efficiency of the media transaction process. Data owners and marketers now have a privacy-compliant mechanism to create, activate and update people-based and household-based audiences in near real-time, removing one of the few remaining barriers to timely, meaningful consumer interactions at scale. Audience Informed Media FAQ Q: How does the Audience Informed Media platform actually work? A.  Audience Informed Media utilizes a form of supply-path optimization called bid enrichment, allowing data owners and marketers to create universal, audience-based private marketplaces capable of functioning across any DSP, SSP, publisher or inventory type. A marketer loads device-, person- or household-level audience data to the platform and creates custom targeting segments.  These audience segments are assigned a unique Deal ID, and then represented across the programmatic marketplace for buyers to target via the DSPs of their choosing. The Deal ID filters out all non-relevant auction inventory from existing SSPs and publishers, and surfaces only bid-requests that meet the most up-to-date audience profiles and targeting criteria. Q: What are the benefits of bid enrichment? A. Bid enrichment more closely aligns known audience demand with available inventory supply, benefiting all participants in the programmatic value chain. Agencies and advertisers gain access to near real-time, self-serve audience activation & management with seamless people-based reporting across platforms Data providers gain a real-time solution to deliver their audience data directly to buyers in a privacy compliant fashion, with native tools to support usage monitoring and client invoicing As are result of bringing this new and unique demand, publishers & SSPs earn higher yield in programmatic channels due to increased bid density and fill rates Lastly, DSPs see increased efficiency in the auctions they listen to and an increase in revenue as data is bundled into the sale of the inventory Q: What type of data are you using to enrich the bid stream? A. Experian’s proprietary identity assets underpin the audience matching and enrichment process, and thus Audience Informed Media is particularly focused on the timely activation of person and household addressable audience segments.  These segments can be built from Experian’s ConsumerView data, or any combination of other 1st and 3rd party data sets. Q: Is this limited to certain inventory types? A. Not at all.  The platform is designed to support audience targeting across all inventory types, from traditional environments such as display, video and in-app, to emerging programmatic channels like advanced TV, audio, and out-of-home. Q: How is this different from reselling? A. Experian’s approach to bid enrichment is in no way analogous to inventory arbitrage, where non-value-add players insert themselves between buyers and sellers, extracting profit and reducing overall performance. Audience Informed Media operates with transparency, representing the original publisher/seller relationship in an enriched auction.  Enriched auctions simply augment the original auction in two ways:  1) the appending of relevant Deal IDs for each end buyer, and 2) the inventory price adjustment necessary to cover any data usage fees imposed by an audience data provider for use of their segments in targeting. Through the bundling of data and inventory, Audience Informed Media helps marketers reach their goal of seamless people-based marketing at scale.  Q: What are the implications for pricing and yield management? A. Pricing is flexible with Audience Informed Media. Sellers can utilize fixed-rate, pre-negotiated terms with a floor price, or via open-RTB (with or without a floor price). Specific terms can be determined on a case-by-case basis. Q: Is this GDPR compliant? A. For data coming out of or passing through the EU, Experian is responsible for gaining user consent for that data's collection, storage, and further processing - and sharing that consent (and any eventual changes to that consent) with all data processors.  Our partner, BidSwitch, is also committed to ensuring all processes and protocols are in place by May 25, 2018 to ensure compliance with GDPR. Want to learn more about Experian’s Audience Informed Media platform? Interested in being a beta participant? Please complete our brief form.  

Marketers and data services providers in the United States are preparing for the upcoming European Union data protection regulation and its potential impact on US businesses in their use and processing of EU personal data. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) takes effect on May 25, 2018, and will regulate control and processing of EU consumer personal data in and outside of the European Union. If your company offers goods or services to, or monitors the activities of, EU consumers, it may be directly regulated by the GDPR and have to comply with its requirements. Failure to comply subject to fines of up to 4% of annual worldwide revenue. The GDPR includes new rights for EU consumers, strengthening their control over use of their personal data, creating a new right to be forgotten, and providing transparency for the use and distribution of their personal data. Controllers (or companies that determine the purposes and means of processing EU personal data) have new accountability, security, and breach notification requirements, and must enter into specific obligations with any processors of their EU personal data. Data services providers like Experian have been preparing for GDPR by assessing their internal operations to review their intake, use, and processing of data to ensure they can comply with GDPR’s requirements. At Experian, we are taking the additional step of a rigorous self-assessment process to certify that we meet all Privacy Shield certification requirements before May 25. We do this so our clients can be confident in using Experian services that their EU personal data will be processed in compliance with GDPR. For additional information on this topic, we encourage you to review the Data and Marketing Association (The DMA) industry guidance at https://thedma.org/resources/compliance-resources/gdpr-compliance/12-tips-marketers-prepare-gdpr-compliance/. Of course, you will want to work with your attorneys and compliance team to confirm what your obligations may be with respect to the GDPR.

Experian is pleased to announce our involvement in The Internet of Things Consortium (IoTC) as a member organization. Experian joins more than 60 leading companies as influencers in facilitating strategic partnerships and developing business prospects that drive the Internet of Things (IoT) industry forward. B2B IoT spending reached almost $1 trillion in 2017, and the B2C market is also experiencing stratospheric growth. The number of connected devices and the corresponding data they generate is quickly adding to the endless amount of data signals. As part of the IoTC, Experian will help drive the conversation around data including data rights, acceptable usage, data ownership and privacy. We believe data when used properly can help people, businesses, government organizations and society at large. The data derived from connected devices can help businesses make smarter decisions, prevent fraud and better connect with customers.  According to Experian’s 2018 global data management benchmark report, nearly all of the C-level executives (95%) believe that data is an integral part of forming their business strategy and more than half of the businesses say that data and analytics will provide a key source of opportunity in the coming year. The real value, however, does not come from simply amassing huge amounts of data, but from extracting actionable insights through deep analysis of that data.  At Experian, we use data and insights to help brands have more meaningful interactions with people. As experts in helping clients unlock the power of data, we look forward to working with the IoTC to help them navigate a powerful and complicated component of the Internet of Things industry. The IoTC is a business development organization aimed at connecting IoT thought leaders and companies to form meaningful partnerships that drive industry growth and development. The IoTC’s unique focus on business development brings together companies from five IoT verticals — connected homes, autos, cities, retail, and wearables. We are pleased to be members of an organization that is working to bring IoT from early adoption to mass market. They are tackling industry roadblocks for IoT products and services while allowing members to share their knowledge in the form of broadcast IoT research, case studies and best practices to educate the broader business community and consumers.

The analytical revolution: three suggestions that will help you to reimage analytics in your organization and drive your business further.

Marketers should focus on three core areas to deliver the most value to customers: preference data, message relevancy, and a mobile-first approach.

Webhooks are connections within the internet that enable events and data to be easily shared between systems.