
Our next segment in our Ask the Expert series dives into the importance of data enrichment and its benefits across connected TV (CTV) advertising. Ask the Expert features a series of conversations with product experts where we focus on topics that matter the most in AdTech. In our latest segment, Natalia Irmin, Director of Strategic Data & Media Partnerships at a4 Advertising, joins us to chat with Experian’s SVP of Sales & Partnerships, Chris Feo.
a4 is an advanced advertising and data company that offers audience-based, multiscreen advertising solutions for local and national advertising businesses.
In their conversation, Natalia and Chris review:
- The benefits of data enrichment
- First-party data enrichment across advertising
- Data enrichment in CTV advertising
- How Experian and a4 work together
What is data enrichment?
Data enrichment enhances first-party data sets using third-party data sources. This process involves merging first-party data from internal sources with data gathered from other internal sources or from external third-party sources.
Examples of data that can be part of the enrichment process include:
- Demographic information
- Contextual signals
- Behavioral patterns
- Interests
- Purchase-intent
The more you know about your customers, the better equipped you are to reach them where they are with the right message. By enriching your data, you can enhance your messaging, provide personalized offers, and establish a loyal customer base.
First-party data enrichment across advertising
Businesses are transitioning from cookie-based third-party targeting to first-party data enrichment solutions as a result of cookie deprecation. When data enrichment is paired with internal first-party data, you can generate a more holistic customer profile.
a4 has a rich set of first-party data, based on the subscriptions to their services. a4 uses first-party data enrichment across advertising in two ways:
- Measure performance using their viewership data
- Advise their customers on where they should focus their advertising efforts based on the customer’s viewing behavior
a4 supports the enrichment of their customers’ first-party data so they can get the most out of their insights.With Experian’s privacy-first approach, a4 can continue to rely on their first-party data while protecting personally identifiable information (PII).
Data enrichment in CTV advertising
CTV advertising refers to digital advertising that appears through a streaming service during a viewer’s video content, like a movie or TV show. CTV ad campaigns allow businesses to personalize their digital marketing messages while the viewer watches content on various platforms. CTV offers a highly measurable opportunity to increase brand awareness.
Benefits of data enrichment in CTV advertising
Data enrichment provides three key benefits that can enhance targeting, personalization, and campaign effectiveness in CTV advertising.
Understand your target audience
By using enriched data such as demographic information, viewing behavior, and interests, you can gain deeper insights into your target audience, refine your targeting strategies, and create highly personalized ad experiences. Data enrichment also enables better measurement and optimization of ad campaigns, maximizing ROI.
Integrate enriched data with other marketing channels
You can integrate enriched data into CTV with data from other marketing channels. This enables the creation of comprehensive and cohesive marketing strategies that provide consistent messaging and enhance cross-channel targeting.
Enhance the value of ad inventory
Data enrichment can also benefit content publishers and broadcasters by enhancing the value of ad inventory and providing more targeted and effective advertising opportunities.
Enabling your marketers to target specific audiences will result in improved campaign performance. Through data enrichment, you can increase return on your ad spend and boost the value of your publisher’s ad inventory. a4 and Experian can help your business attract additional demand with audience enrichment. a4 uses Experian’s vast offering of audiences and combines it with Experian’s Graph. This data can later be used to activate across a4’s parent company, Altice’s owned and operated properties, as well as beyond Altice’s own footprint via premium publisher partners.
How Experian and a4 work together
a4 and Experian have a long-standing partnership that enables a4 to enhance its data. Through our Consumer View and Consumer Sync products, a4 can add audience attributes to its subscriber and viewer data to precisely pinpoint the audience that its clients are targeting. Experian helps a4 in building a comprehensive customer profile, which helps expand the customer base for a4’s advertising clients.
We form partnerships, like we do with Experian, to enhance our data further, so that we can combine the power of the viewership and exposure data for those other attributes that clients might need.” – Natalia Irmin, Director, Data & Strategic Partnerships, a4 Advertising
Through Experian’s audience attributes and Graph, a4 can assist advertisers in targeting audiences beyond their usual reach, creating a better user experience. a4 can personalize experiences and promotions to prioritize customers with a higher likelihood of making a purchase. By tailoring messages and promotions to individual customer preferences, businesses can improve their advertising efforts and deliver them through their preferred channels.
Watch the full Q&A
Visit our Ask the Expert content hub to watch Natalia and Chris’s full conversation about data enrichment and its benefits across the advertising world. In the Q&A, Natalia and Chris also share their thoughts on the importance of first-party data enrichment, addressability, and measurability in CTV advertising.
About our experts

Natalia Irmin, Director, Strategic Data & Media Partnerships, a4 Advertising
Natalia Irmin is the Director of Strategic Data & Media Partnerships for a4 Advertising. With over 10 years of experience working with data in the Defense, Finance, and Advertising industries, Natalia currently leads the a4 Strategic Partnerships team in the development of advanced data and media products in support of the organization’s media planning, buying, and advanced analytics business. Natalia holds an MBA from the NYU Stern School of Business and a Bachelor of Arts from Tel Aviv University in Israel.

Chris Feo, SVP, Sales & Partnerships, Experian
As SVP of Sales & Partnerships, Chris has over a decade of experience across identity, data, and programmatic. Chris joined Experian during the Tapad acquisition in November 2020. He joined Tapad with less than 10 employees and has been part of the executive team through both the Telenor and Experian acquisitions. He’s an active advisor, board member, and investor within the AdTech ecosystem. Outside of work, he’s a die-hard golfer, frequent traveler, and husband to his wife, two dogs, and two goats!
Latest posts

Two storied franchises will collide in this year’s Super Bowl, the Green Bay Packers and the Pittsburgh Steelers. Sports fans from both markets are huge supporters of their football teams, but a look into their behavior and attitudes reveals passions beyond a one-dimensional Cheesehead or Towel Twirler. Considering the vast preferences, marketers recognize the need to define characteristics that truly distinguish their target audience. To provide those insights, we conducted a detailed market analysis using a wide variety of data sources including research information from Experian Simmons, Hitwise, and the Mosaic Consumer Lifestyle segmentation solution, which defines the predominant household types for each area (as featured in yesterday’s post: Cheeseheads vs. Terrible Towels). Today, we delve further into the hearts and houses of Green Bay and Pittsburgh area residents. GREEN BAY FANS PACK THEM IN FOR TAILGATING Green Bay area residents are more passionate about tailgating compared to their rivals in Pittsburgh. Among those who identify themselves as NFL football fans, Green Bay fans are 1.45 times more likely than Pittsburgh fans to have participated in a tailgate party within the past 12 months. They are also better equipped to tailgate due to a higher ownership rate for midsize SUVs, and both light duty and full size pickups (Road & Track magazine top-rated picks for tailgating), compared to Pittsburgh fans. STELLA AND STEELERS GO TOGETHER With every tailgate comes a beverage of choice, and in today’s analysis we’ve found that Bud Light and Budweiser are the light/low calorie and regular domestic brands of beer favored the most by both Green Bay and Pittsburgh fans. However, Pittsburgh fans are 1.56 times more likely than Green Bay fans to down a few of premium brand, Stella Artois. Notably, along with its best selling brands, Anheuser-Busch plans to devote a portion of its multi-million dollar ad spend to this Belgian import. FANTASIZING ABOUT FOOTBALL While all that tailgating is going on, Green Bay fans might also be boasting about their latest fantasy sports selections. They are 1.34 times more likely to say that they participate in a fantasy sports league compared to Pittsburgh fans. That’s not to say that Pittsburgh fans don’t enjoy their fantasy sports, indexing above the national average for visiting fantasy sports and football websites. PLAYING IN THE GREAT OUTDOORS Packers and Steelers fans enjoy being out in the elements, so chances are you’ll probably never see a dome over either Lambeau or Heinz Field. The most popular Green Bay football fan activities, with a higher participation rate compared to Pittsburgh fans, are: golfing, camping, state fairs, hunting, power boating and motorcycling. In the Pittsburgh area, with its impressive network of recreational trails, residents are 1.23 times more likely to in-line/roller skate and are 1.36 times more likely to play hockey, compared to Green Bay. Off land analysis shows that despite Green Bay residents’ close proximity to Lake Michigan and a multitude of water sport opportunities, Pittsburgh fans are more likely to spend time on the water, namely: canoeing, kayaking, sailing, and fly fishing. THROWING DEEP VERSUS HANDING OFF Each year Super Bowl advertisers try to reach their audiences across broadly defined demographics with little ability to measure the direct impact of their super-sized investments. It’s the equivalent of throwing a “Hail Mary” and hoping the receiver will leap above the clutter of defenders and catch the ball. Direct marketers, however, are using the behavioral and attitudinal data we’ve shared here to deliver their messages to a precisely targeted sub-audience. For marketers who want to be relevant and target accurately, this capability is the playmaker that scores a game winning touchdown every time. Click here for the full article Blog post author: Bill Schneider, VP, Experian Marketing Services. We’d love to hear your stories and how you’ve used lifestyle data. Please leave your comments or feedback below.

According to weekly trend data from Experian Simmons DataStreamSM, the number of U.S. adults paying a monthly visit to microblogging site Twitter.com has fallen during the past year by 14%. As of November 29, 2010, 8.25 million adults had made at least one visit to Twitter.com during the previous 30 days, down from 9.54 million adults who had visited the site in the 30 days prior to November 30, 2009. Does this mean the ultimate “fail whale” is lurking just over the horizon for Twitter? Not just yet. Among those who visit Twitter.com, Simmons DataStream shows that the average number of visits per month rose a relative 37% in the last year. Twitter.com visits in late November 2010, in fact, reached an average of 10.0 visits per month, up from just 7.3 visits per month the year prior. As visit frequency increased, however, the duration of the average Twitter.com session declined, suggesting visitors today are seeking more frequent quick hits, rather than spending longer periods of time reading through posts. According to Experian Hitwise, the average amount of time Twitter.com visitors spend on the site during a typical session fell to 13 minutes, 12 seconds on November 27, 2010, down from an average of 15 minutes, 12 seconds spent on the site each session on November 28, 2009. That said, Americans are still spending more time on Twitter.com than ever before. According to Experian Simmons estimates, Americans spent an estimated 2 hours and 12 minutes tweeting and reading tweets on Twitter.com in November 2010, up from 1 hour and 51 minutes spent on the site during November 2009. Swim on, fail whale, swim on. To tweet this blog post, click on the green “retweet” button at the top of this item. For more information on Simmons DataStream weekly reporting of nearly 40,000 consumer variables, visit our website.

As we ring in the New Year this week, Americans will be tossing back a few adult beverages in celebration. While alcohol consumption certainly increases around holidays and other times of celebration, many Americans imbibe year-round. So where across this great land of ours are you most likely to find adults willing and able to raise a glass (or two) and where are you most likely to be surrounded by teetotalers? Experian Simmons has the answer. Leveraging data from our SimmonsLOCAL study, we examined the drinking patterns of adults of legal drinking age in the 106 Designated Market Areas (DMAs) with populations of at least 500,000 adults age 21 and older. We then ranked those markets by the number of alcoholic beverages consumed by the average adult during a typical month. The chart below lists the DMAs that consume the most alcoholic beverages per capita in a typical month. First place goes to Boston, where the average adult of legal drinking age regularly kicks back 14.4 drinks a month. (Celebrations in Beantown are probably already underway.) Rank DMA Average drinks per month 1 Boston 14.4 2 Austin 13.8 3 Providence-New Bedford 13.4 4 Madison 13.2 4 Hartford & New Haven 13.2 6 Philadelphia 13.1 7 Chicago 13 8 Denver 12.9 9 Tallahassee-Thomasville 12.8 9 Milwaukee 12.8 11 Minneapolis-St. Paul 12.6 11 West Palm Beach-Ft. Pierce 12.6 11 Seattle-Tacoma 12.6 11 Tucson (Sierra Vista) 12.6 15 Green Bay-Appleton 12.5 16 San Diego 12.4 16 Baltimore 12.4 16 Washington, DC 12.4 16 Albany-Schenectady-Troy 12.4 20 New Orleans 12.3 20 St. Louis 12.3 20 Colorado Springs-Pueblo 12.3 23 Burlington-Plattsburgh 12.2 23 Syracuse 12.2 23 Norfolk-Portsmouth-Newport News 12.2 23 Spokane 12.2 23 Portland-Auburn 12.2 Source: Experian Simmons Adult residents of the markets listed below surely know how to have a good time-it's just unlikely to include a cocktail. The chart below lists the DMAs that consume the fewest alcoholic beverages per capita in a typical month. Residents of Chattanooga consume only 6 alcoholic beverages per month, on average, making it the least imbibing market-and probably the one that feels the best the morning after a big gathering. Rank DMA Average drinks per month 106 Chattanooga 6 105 Salt Lake City 7.2 105 Florence-Myrtle Beach 7.2 105 Charleston-Huntington 7.2 105 Tri-Cities, TN-VA 7.2 101 Knoxville 7.4 100 Lexington 7.9 99 Birmingham 8 98 Huntsville-Decatur 8.5 97 Nashville 8.9 97 Evansville 8.9 95 Paducah-Cape Girardeau-Harrisburg-Mt Vernon 9.1 94 Springfield, MO 9.2 94 Tulsa 9.2 94 Greenville-New Bern-Washington 9.2 91 Memphis 9.3 90 Greenville-Spartanburg-Asheville-Anderson 9.4 90 Jackson, MS 9.4 90 Wichita-Hutchinson Plus 9.4 86 Little Rock-Pine Bluff 9.5 86 Louisville 9.5 86 Ft. Smith-Fayetteville-Springdale-Rogers 9.5 83 Fresno-Visalia 9.6 82 Greensboro-High Point-Winston Salem 9.7 82 Roanoke-Lynchburg 9.7 Source: Experian Simmons For more information on SimmonsLOCAL's vivid reporting of consumer behaviors, attitudes, lifestyles and media consumption in 209 Designated Market Areas down to the ZIP code level, visit our website.
