Centralized data access is emerging as a key strategy for advertisers. In our next Ask the Expert segment, we explore this topic further and discuss the importance of data ownership and the concept of audience as an asset.
We’re joined by industry leaders, Andy Fisher, Head of Merkury Advanced TV at Merkle, and Chris Feo, Experian’s SVP of Sales & Partnerships who spotlight Merkle’s commitment to centralized data access and how advertisers can use our combined solutions to navigate industry shifts while ensuring consumer privacy. Watch our Q&A to learn more about these topics and gain insights on how to stay ahead of industry changes.
The concept of audience as an asset
In order to gain actionable marketing insights about your audience, you need to identify consumers who are actively engaged with your brand and compare them against non-engaged consumers, or consumers engaged with rival brands.
Audience ownership
Audience ownership is a fundamental marketing concept where marketers build, define, create, and own their audience. This approach allows you to use your audiences as an asset and deliver a customized journey to the most promising prospects across multiple channels. With this strategy, you enhance marketing effectiveness and ensure ownership over your audience, no matter the platform or channel used.
Merkle enables marketers to own and deploy said asset (audience) so that marketers can have direct control over their audience. With audience strategy, you can tie all elements together – amplify your marketing reach, while maintaining control of your audience. Merkle connects customer experiences with business results.
Data ownership
Data ownership refers to the control organizations have over data they generate, including marketing, sales, product, and customer data. This data is often scattered across multiple platforms, making it difficult to evaluate their effectiveness. Alternatively, owning this data, which is typically housed in a data warehouse, allows the creation of historical overviews, forecasting of customer trends, and cross-channel comparisons. With advertisers and publishers both claiming ownership over their respective data and wanting to control its access, there has been a growing interest in data clean rooms.
Data clean rooms
The growing interest in data clean rooms is largely due to marketers increasing preference to maintain ownership over their audience data. They provide a secure environment for controlled collaboration between advertisers and publishers while preserving the privacy of valuable data. Data clean rooms allow all parties to define their usage terms – who can access it, how it is used, and when it is used. The rise in the use of data clean rooms strengthens data privacy and creates opportunities for deeper customer insights, which leads to enhanced customer targeting. Data clean rooms unlock new data sets, aiding brands, publishers, and data providers in adapting to rapidly changing privacy requirements.
Why is centralized data access important?
Centralized data access is crucial for the effective organization and optimization of your advertising campaigns. It involves consolidating your data in one place, allowing for the identification of inconsistencies.
Merkle’s Merkury platform
The concept of centralized data is a key component of Merkle’s Merkury platform, an enterprise identity platform that empowers brands to own and control first-party identity at an individual level. A common use case involves marketers combining their first-party data with Merkury’s data assets and marketplace data assets to build prospecting audiences. These are later published to various endpoints for activation.
The Merkury platform covers three classes of data:
- Proprietary data set – Permissioned data set covering the entire United States, compiled from about 40 different vendors
- Marketplace data – Includes contributions from various vendors like Experian
- First-party data from marketers – Allows marketers to bring in their own data
Merkury’s identity platform empowers brands to own and control first-party identity at an individual level, unifying known and unknown customer and prospect records, site and app visits, and consumer data to a single, person ID. This makes Merkury the only enterprise identity platform that combines the accuracy and sustainability of client first-party data, quality personally identifiable information (PII) data, third-party data, cookie-less media, and technology platform connections in the market.
End-to-end management of data
Data ownership and management enables you to enhance the quality of your data, facilitate the exchange of information, and ensure privacy compliance.
The Merkury platform provides a comprehensive, end-to-end solution for managing first-party data, all rooted in identity. Unlike data management platforms (DMPs) that are primarily built on cookies, the Merkury platform is constructed on a person ID, allowing it to operate effectively in a cookie-free environment.
A broader perspective with people-based views
The Merkury platform is unique because it contains data from almost every individual in the United States, providing a broader perspective compared to customer data platforms (CDPs) which only contain consumer data. The platform provides a view of the world in a people-based manner, but also offers the flexibility to toggle between person and household views. This enables you to turn data into actionable insights and makes it possible to target specific individuals within a household or consider the household as a whole.
How Experian and Merkle work together
Experian and Merkle have established a strong partnership that magnifies the capabilities of Merkle’s Merkury platform. With Experian’s robust integration capabilities and extensive connectivity opportunities, customers can use this technology for seamless direct integrations, resulting in more effective onboarding to various channels, like digital and TV.
“Experian’s role in Merkury’s data marketplace is essential as they are considered the gold standard for data. It significantly contributes to our connectivity through direct integrations and partnerships. Experian’s presence in various platforms and technologies ensures easy connections and high match rates. Our partnership is very important to us.”
andy fisher, head of merkury advanced tv
Through this partnership, Merkle can deliver unique, personalized digital customer experiences across multiple platforms and devices, highlighting their commitment to data-driven performance marketing.
Watch the full Q&A
Visit our Ask the Expert content hub to watch Andy and Chris’s full conversation about data ownership, innovative strategies to empower you to overcome identity challenges, and navigating industry shifts while protecting consumer privacy.
Tune into the full recording to gain insights into the captivating topics of artificial intelligence (AI), understanding how retail networks can amplify the value of media, and the growing influence of connected TV (CTV). Dive into the Q&A to gain rich insights that could greatly influence your strategies.
About our experts
Andy Fisher, Head of Merkury Advanced TV
As the Head of Merkury Advanced TV, Andy’s primary responsibility is driving person-based marketing and big data adoption in all areas of Television including Linear, Addressable, Connected, Programmatic, and X-channel planning and Measurement. Andy has held several positions at Merkle including Chief Analytics Officer and he ran the Merkle data business. Prior to joining Merkle, Andy was the EVP, Global Data & Analytics Director at Starcom MediaVest Group where he led the SMG global analytics practice. In this role, he built and managed a team of 150 analytics professionals across 17 countries servicing many of the world’s largest advertisers. Prior to that role, Andy was Vice President and National Lead, Analytics at Razorfish, where he led the digital analytics practice and managed a team of modeling, survey, media data, and business intelligence experts. He and his team were responsible for some of the first innovations in multi-touchpoint attribution and joining online/offline data for many of the Fortune 100. Andy has also held leadership positions at Personify and IRI. Andy holds a BA in mathematics from UC Berkeley and an MA in statistics from Stanford.
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!
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2022 was a year of adjustment. Consumers adjusted to a post-pandemic world and returned to pre-pandemic shopping behaviors. Consumers adjusted their budgets as the price of goods skyrocketed, as a result of high inflation. To combat inflation, the U.S. Federal Reserve adjusted interest rates. This further restricted consumer buying power. The AdTech ecosystem also experienced adjustments. Google adjusted the date of cookie deprecation. Federal legislation forced technology companies to adjust their consumer privacy practices. Marketers and advertisers adjusted how they address interoperability issues by investing in clean room solutions. This year of adjustment makes it harder to predict where consumers will spend and how marketers should plan their digital audience strategies. What will 2023 bring to AdTech? Download our 2023 AdTech trends and predictions report to access our forecast to help you plan for 2023. Our report will answer: How has digital activation changed over the last four years? What are the top advertising platforms? Which digital audiences are advertisers buying? Do digital audience strategies vary by vertical? Our AdTech trends forecast In 2023, digital activation will increase. Digital audience activation continues to grow at a significant rate despite market shocks like the pandemic, inflation, and higher interest rates. Given the current economic uncertainty, we predict that marketers will look toward tried and true channels where they are confident they will have quality audiences, inventory, and be able to drive ROI. What will digital activation look like in 2023? Between 2018-2021, digital audience activation increased annually by 46%. Using projected 2022 results, between 2018-2022, it will increase annually by 34%. We anticipate continued growth in 2023. Top advertising platforms in 2023 2023 will see increased digital activation, but which platforms will advertisers use to serve their ads? Advertisers will shift their focus to demand-side, video, and supply-side platforms. Social media platforms will continue to experience volatility. Advertisers will place bigger bets on the combination of addressable and CTV. Our report will also reveal which platforms are creating a path toward a post-cookie future and where data-sharing relationships will become the strongest. The most popular advertiser audiences trending now in AdTech Which digital audiences are advertisers buying? Demographics Modeled Lifestyles Behavioral Custom Audiences Traditional targeting methods like Demographics and Modeled Lifestyles are the baseline of many marketing strategies. We predict that we will continue to see marketers activate against these data sets. Digital audience strategies by vertical Digital audience strategies vary by vertical. Download our report to uncover the digital audiences purchased by advertisers in the following industries: Financial Services Health Retail & CPG Technology & Communication Download our new 2025 Digital trends and predictions report Marketers, agencies, and platforms are facing new challenges as privacy regulations evolve, AI technology advances, and consumer behaviors shift. Our latest report highlights actionable strategies for navigating these changes and improving how you connect with audiences, measure impact, and deliver results. What you’ll learn Navigating signal loss: Explore the rise of alternative IDs and contextual targeting as privacy regulations and signal loss reshape data-driven advertising. Connected TV (CTV): Understand the growth of connected TV (CTV), the importance of frequency capping, and strategies for effective audience activation. Omnichannel campaigns: Learn how marketers are moving from channel-specific strategies to audience-led omnichannel campaigns that tell a more cohesive story. Retail media networks: Learn how retail media networks (RMNs) are capitalizing on enriched first-party data to learn more about their customers and reach them across on-site and off-site inventory. Curation: Examine how curation is transforming programmatic campaigns by combining audience, contextual, and supply chain signals to deliver premium inventory packages that maximize addressability, efficiency, and performance. Download now
Advertisers continue to increase their spending across addressable TV, connected TV (CTV), and digital. According to IAB's "2021 Video Ad Spend and 2022 Outlook" report, digital video ad spending is expected to increase by 26% to $49.2 billion in 2022. Understanding who consumers are and how to best reach them in their preferred channel is becoming more complex. Damian Amitin and Colleen Dawe discuss how a seamless identity strategy can address the complexity of the emerging TV space. The evolution of identity resolution Around ten years ago, the idea of digital “identity resolution” or “Device Graphs” was born. This idea connected cookies and MAIDs to understand when many IDs were the same person or household. In more recent years, our industry began to connect that initial understanding to the CTV ecosystem. But, a large part of the TV ecosystem existed in silos, like first and third-party audience data, and the growing advanced TV market. The goal of identity resolution has always been to understand the consumer better. To achieve more accurate targeting and measurement in the CTV ecosystem, we must incorporate the following: What we know about the household and consumer from an ID perspective Who the consumer is as it relates to audience data, as well as the wealth of first-party data in the advanced TV space We know the cookie is a flawed way to collect data. While Google delayed the deprecation of third-party cookies, there are other challenges that we face right now. Such as the glaring gap in Safari traffic and the Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA) turning to “opt-in." Understanding consumer behavior across devices and platforms continues to challenge marketers and publishers. These challenges are creating the need to find more stable identifiers. Though the cookie remains valuable, it has an uncertain future. This has led advertisers to place bigger bets on the combination of addressable and CTV. The overlap in addressable and CTV data leads to fragmentation Personally identifiable information (PII) makes up the majority of addressable TV households' data. Part of the attraction to CTV is that their IDs remain universal, persistent, and stable. Analysts project that CTV ad spending will hit $23B in 2023. Consumers now have an average of 4.7 streaming subscriptions per household. It’s no surprise then, that Disney+, HBO, and Netflix released or announced ad-supported tiers. Addressable TV and CTV are often thought of as distinct markets across the industry. But, in the context of identity, we should look at them through the same lens. Millions of households still consume TV and video content via a set-top box or through apps on CTVs. This is in addition to what they consume on their laptops, tablets, and phones. Of the top 11 cable and satellite providers, 65 million U.S. households still have a box in their homes. On the other hand, approximately 96 million U.S. households have at least one or more Smart TVs and streaming services. With about 126 million total U.S. TV households, that’s a lot of overlap. There are still significant numbers of both addressable and CTV homes. How can we address fragmented TV consumption? Through a holistic and comprehensive approach to identity. An approach that captures addressable TV, CTV, and digital identifiers. An approach that captures all audience attributes inside of a single identity graph. This is the ideal approach for publishers, AdTech vendors, and brands. Discover how to unlock holistic identity How can we achieve a holistic identity? Through a three-pillared approach: First-party data onboarding Digital identifiers Consumer data First-party data onboarding Bringing offline data from a brand’s consumers is very valuable due to the quality of the data. Because the data is being collected right from the source, you know it’s accurate. It provides the foundation you can build your identity strategy from. Digital identifiers Once you create a foundation with first-party data, you need to connect it. Either with an internal or licensed digital ID graph. Then you can understand the connections between all devices within the household. Consumer data After you know which devices tie to a single consumer, you'll want to act on that knowledge. The next step is to partner with a data provider that can help you understand your consumers. Establishing this partnership will help improve targeting, measurement, and the customer experience. To achieve a well-rounded customer view tomorrow, we need to start today The three-pillared approach bridges the gap between the offline and online worlds. This provides a well-rounded view of customers and audiences. However, the ability to tie these aspects of identity together still presents several challenges. To achieve the three-pillared approach today, you need to use many vendors and fragmented data sources. Often with conflicting data. As we look forward, the tools to do this are becoming more advanced and unified. The players in our ecosystem should adopt a seamless identity strategy. One that provides a privacy-safe yet full-picture solution. That means capturing and unifying all devices within a household. While also understanding the consumer behaviors and profiles behind those devices. As TV becomes more sophisticated, our data and services will enable you to unlock a holistic identity. Chris Feo, SVP of Advanced TV and Platforms, spoke with Broadcasting & Cable about how our data powers measurement, audience insights, and results for businesses within the TV space. "As more and more companies enter the general TV space, whether you're a publisher, an advertiser or anyone in between that's doing measurement, insights, analytics, our data or our services will play a role in some part of that value exchange." – Chris Feo, SVP of Advanced TV and Platforms, Experian Marketing Services Keep up with your customers and their data Once we create an informed identity strategy, we can begin to understand the makeup of each household and the individuals within. In this new world, personalizing the experience for an audience is key. Where do they prefer to spend their time? What type of content are they most engaged in? Only then can we as an industry provide an optimal experience for each consumer. All while driving greater ROI for advertisers and publishers. Are you ready to know more about your customers than ever before? Let's get to work together to achieve your marketing goals. Contact us to learn how we can connect the complex dots of identity resolution. About our experts Damian Amitin, VP of Enterprise Partnerships, Experian Marketing Services Damian Amitin is the VP of Enterprise Partnerships and joined Experian during the Tapad acquisition in November 2020. Damian is a senior sales and partnerships executive, specializing in the identity resolution and marketing data ecosystem. Damian helps brands, publishers, and technology vendors enable enhanced ID resolution through The Experian/Tapad platform to attain a 360 view of the customer across targeting analytics, attribution, and personalization. Colleen Dawe, Senior Account Executive, Experian Marketing Services Colleen Dawe is a Senior Account Executive on the Advanced TV Team within Experian Marketing Services. With 15 years of experience working within the television ecosystem, Colleen works with clients to bring the value and expertise of Experian to support their objectives in the areas of data, identity, activation, and measurement.
Over the past two decades, we’ve seen healthcare become increasingly interconnected. Healthcare systems can share a patient's clinical information in a variety of ways. A Pharmacy Benefits Manager can share it through an Electronic Health Record. An MRI scanner can also capture and store patient images on a picture archiving and communication system (PACS). Despite this wealth of information, according to the CDC, 20 million U.S. citizens don’t have access to medical care when they need it. A patient’s well-being should represent more than their clinical data. How can we increase access to care for those individuals? We can look towards non-clinical factors, like the social determinants of health, for answers. Coordinate care for at-risk patients What if you could identify patients who are likely to readmit due to factors outside of their medical conditions? We can use demographic, geographic, and socioeconomic data to discover patients that need greater access to care. The social determinants of health (SDOH) can uncover factors that may increase the burden of disease for some populations. What are the social determinants of health? They are the conditions in the environments where people are born, live, learn, work, play, worship, and age. Think of factors like safe housing, transportation, job opportunities, and education. These conditions can affect a wide range of health, functioning, and quality-of-life outcomes and risks. What insights can the social determinants of health reveal? Experian Health’s Social Determinants of Health solution offers holistic insight into the financial, transportation, and technological barriers individuals may experience. These barriers could hinder their access to care, medication, food, and housing. It's important to find a solution like ours that offers prioritized, proactive suggestions for interventions that help remove or reduce such barriers for improved health outcomes. Our rich household data sets can provide key insights into the SDOH. This data can answer key questions such as: Are there existing populations with housing instability issues? How much price sensitivity do consumers have for medication? Are there markets or locations that have food instability issues? Is transportation an issue that makes it hard for patients to access care facilities? Are there geographic influences that drive or prevent diagnosis and care? In the chart below, we break down the SDOH into five categories. We outline key considerations that offer insights to provide patient-specific context for your caregivers. Finally, we present patient engagement strategies that are SDOH factor-specific and based on best practice interventions and program types. Social determinants of health data in action While much of healthcare focuses on clinical outcomes, our Consumer View data can provide a wealth of insight into a variety of non-clinical factors that can influence quality of care. A profile of core demographics such as age, ethnicity, and gender can uncover new opportunities or highlight areas where engagement does not align with medical research. We can discover patients at-risk for not being able to access essential services utilizing key, social determinants of health and geographic profiling. When combined with core demographics like age, gender, and ethnicity, we can compare any patient population against expected SDOH norms to uncover significant gaps in access to care. Our data shows that: 1 in 12 households have no access to a vehicle 1 in 4 households are sensitive to the cost of medication 1 in 5 households have very low technology sophistication 1 in 7 households live below the federal poverty level Once you have this data, what can you do with it? You can develop an inclusive education and communication campaign with our data-driven content and contact engagement solution. This solution empowers you to pair the perfect messaging styles with the right channels to deliver a personalized experience to broaden your reach. For those individuals who have little access to technology, an email campaign may not reach them. We can identify additional engagement channels like the traditional newspaper, radio, direct mail, or even broadcast TV to determine the best medium to expand your market while increasing access to care. By using decision making styles and engagement channels, together we can reduce the burden of care on the medically underserved. Let’s drive inclusive healthcare together Develop a more holistic view of your patient population while increasing healthcare equity. We can help you use the social determinants of health for actionable care management. Contact us to learn how you can fold this data into your healthcare ecosystem.