Recently, we covered Experian and Neustar’s strategic partnership announcement at the 2016 Client Summit in Las Vegas. This week, Marketing Forward sat down with both companies to discuss some of the questions that have resulted from the partnership announcement.
Q&A Blog Post Contributors:
Paul McLenaghan is the Vice President of Strategic Initiatives at Neustar, Inc. In this role, he oversees product management, market development, and business development activities related to strategic product initiatives, primarily in digital marketing and advertising.
Jay Stocki is the Senior Vice President of Data and Product at Experian Marketing Services. He is responsible for corporate data and product strategy, as well as strategic product initiatives in the digital marketing industry.
Q: What are some of the critical challenges marketers face in terms of data onboarding and omnichannel activation, and how does this partnership address them?
PM: Consumers today move continuously and seamlessly across channels and across devices. So marketers need to as well.
This requires both omnichannel data integration and omnichannel data activation—and that’s exactly what this partnership provides.
Neustar and Experian’s “Data Onboarding and Activation” partnership enables marketers to link their customer data to addressable audiences across all channels and devices—so they can deliver relevant messages to their customers and prospects across all touchpoints.
JS: As Neustar mentioned, marketers have to keep up with consumers while also keeping up with more channels, devices, platforms, publishers and data than ever before.
This partnership enables our clients to keep pace as this offering provides integrations with the biggest media platforms across all channels. The end result is more powerful, one-to-one marketing that meets consumers wherever they are.
Q: What value does each organization bring to the table?
PM: Neustar brings the only onboarding solution grounded on an authoritative identity to ensure the highest match accuracy, so marketers can be confident they are reaching the right consumers with relevant messaging.
When combined with both parties’ partnerships across the world’s largest media companies, as well as leading programmatic media platforms, marketers have the flexibility to leverage their customer data across all channels—using their choice of two leading activation platforms.
With Neustar and Experian, marketers can achieve both accuracy and scale in their data onboarding and activation initiatives. The result is more accurate targeting, less media dollar waste, and a better consumer experience.
JS: Experian also has unparalleled expertise in developing world-class, privacy-compliant data cooperatives. What makes this offering unique is that select brands now have the chance to work together through a cooperative – the Data Exchange Program – to improve their onboarding programs’ accuracy, quality and scale.
By contributing to the Data Exchange Program’s addressable linkage pool, brands are able to maximize their customer reach across all digital touchpoints, while still ensuring the highest level of privacy and transparency.
Q: How do Experian and Neustar address current onboarding challenges that marketers face?
PM: “Dirty data” is a big challenge. We’ve found that anywhere between 50-70% of the match information marketers get from other data onboarding providers includes incorrect linkages and inaccurate matches. This inaccuracy often results in ineffective targeting, irrelevant messaging, poor customer experiences, and tremendous media waste.
For optimum data onboarding, marketers need data that is accurate, precise, and current.
Only Neustar uses an authoritative identity approach to collect, corroborate, and validate consumer and business identifiers for marketing purposes—all while paying the utmost attention to consumer privacy. To further increase the accuracy of marketers’ onboarding initiatives, Neustar utilizes a unique 3-step onboarding process that first “grounds” marketers’ data to our stable, offline, persistent ID. By corroborating marketers’ data with Neustar’s continuously refreshed, offline identity dataset, Neustar resolves multiple identifiers into a single person and delivers higher-quality matches. The result is more accurate data with increased precision, fewer false positives, and greater reach.
JS: Using your first-party data is critical, and to ensure you are maximizing its effectiveness you have to work with an onboarding partner who values accuracy. It’s important to make sure your best data is organized, linked together, stored safely, and accessible to the entire marketing team.
On the other hand, maintaining the freshest, highest quality data requires massive infrastructure investment, expansive ecosystem relationships, and deep institutional knowledge – this partnership delivers on those fundamentals.
Q: Can you explain how marketers can leverage the partnership between Experian and Neustar?
JS: First and foremost, brands should consider leveraging the Data Exchange Program – the end result is higher match rates, plain and simple. Even more, contributing to the addressable cookie pool is as simple as dropping a pixel on a website or email, and everyone benefits in the long run. Marketers can come to either Experian or Neustar to take advantage of our combined solution.
PM: Totally agree. A client can come to either partner for onboarding services and activate their audiences using two of the industry’s leading platforms – Neustar PlatformOne or the Experian Marketing Suite. At the end of the day, clients are seeing better quality and scalability across channels, and that’s a mutual goal this partnership seeks to achieve.
Q: What differentiates this partnership from competitive offerings?
PM: This partnership extends beyond both partners’ commitment to quality, scale and omnichannel activation. What’s important to note is that this is a real solution that marketers can take advantage of today.
JS: Exactly. If a marketer isn’t happy with their current onboarding solution, we can perform a match test to determine that our solution provides a higher match rate. Not only are we looking to provide a higher match rate, but also to double that match rate compared to other providers. The way we see it, the goal of this partnership is to take data onboarding to the next level. We’re here to deliver on the promise we made at Client Summit to help marketers “level up” – it’s just a matter of taking that initial step.
To learn more about the onboarding and how your brand can reach more customers and prospects across channels through this partnership, join Experian Marketing Services at the upcoming AdExchanger Programmatic.IO event in NYC. The workshop takes places at 11:45 and we look forward to you joining us!