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!
Latest posts
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Tapad Device Graph™ and Sojern’s mobile offering unify travel intent signals; achieve amplification rate of more than 600 percent NEW YORK, June 15, 2017 — Tapad, a part of Experian, the leader in cross-device marketing technology, is partnering with Sojern, travel’s direct demand engine, to provide marketers with an even stronger understanding of travelers as they research and shop across multiple devices. Combined with its 350 million global traveler profiles and billions of predictive purchase intent signals, Sojern utilizes the Tapad Device Graph™ to resolve the complex travel consumer journey, target travelers more precisely, and derive more actionable insights for its travel clientele. According to Sojern’s research, travelers visit hundreds of websites preceding their trip purchase, with some consumers reaching upwards of 450 touchpoints prior to booking. Sojern’s partnership with Tapad will help unify these touchpoints across devices, enabling travel brands to more effectively nurture and engage potential buyers during the purchase process, regardless of which device they use. “Sojern’s been focused on travel for over a decade, helping brands activate predictive purchase signals and leverage our traveler profiles into effective performance marketing campaigns,” said Mat Harris, Sojern’s VP of Product, Enterprise Solutions. “The cross-device insights we gain from the Tapad Device Graph provide a valuable tool for our customers to reach travelers across devices in real-time and at scale, on the right device.” Prior to selecting Tapad as its cross-device partner, Sojern surveyed several probabilistic and deterministic cross-device vendors and performed an extensive global test. The test was an examination of scale, match rate and several other factors, which enabled Sojern to learn as much as possible about each vendor. After examining the final test results, Sojern selected Tapad based on its excellent test performance, tried-and-true experience in the market and complimentary business model. To date, Sojern has already seen an amplification rate of more than 600 percent as a result of the integration, meaning that the Tapad Device Graph is connecting an average of six or more device and browser IDs for every one existing Sojern ID. “Not only is Sojern a compatible partner for our singular Device Graph capabilities, but they are also an incredible data partner to help expand our work in the travel industry,” said Pierre Martensson, SVP and GM of Tapad’s global data division. “Working with the team at Sojern allows us to solve a true challenge within the travel industry today: creating a unified view of customers so travel brands can better understand and access their key audiences at every point along their path to purchase.” Contact us today!
Leading data insights and cross-device-powered services bridge mobile insights with connectivity to drive real-time consumer intelligence NEW YORK, May 17, 2017 /PRNewswire/ — Tapad, now a part of Experian, the leader in cross-device marketing technology, has partnered with Resonate, a leading provider of real-time consumer intelligence and activation SaaS solutions. Through this partnership, Resonate will leverage the Tapad Device Graph™ to capture a deeper understanding of its mobile app audiences and provide brands with a more direct connection to their intended consumers. The integration of Resonate and Tapad's technologies equips mobile app brands with insights into their consumers' values, beliefs, motivations and purchase drivers. As a result, mobile app brands will better understand how to tailor messaging, drive advertising engagement, increase lift in performance across mobile consumers and ultimately boost revenue and returns. Utilizing the advanced data that the Tapad Device Graph™ provides, Resonate will create an Identity Service that connects mobile IDs to Resonate IDs for reporting insights both in-platform and out. To date, Tapad and Resonate have already driven incremental device connections for nearly 60 percent of customer profiles with an amplification rate of more than 120 percent, resulting in more than 400 million net new IDs within Resonate's user base. "After testing multiple partners over the course of 12 months, it was clear that Tapad was the partner for us, given their ability to provide cross-device connectivity for more than one billion unique IDs against our consumer base," said Joel Pulliam, SVP and chief product officer at Resonate. "In addition, Resonate customers have an inherent trust in Tapad's mix of probabilistic and deterministic mobile connectivity data to provide a unified understanding of their mobile audiences." "Partnering with Resonate will not only provide its brands with a more in-depth and actionable understanding of its consumers, but it will also allow our clients to connect with mobile consumers on a deeper level," said Pierre Martensson, SVP and GM of Tapad's global data division. "Resonate is not just answering the question of 'how' consumers are making purchases, but also tackling the more difficult question of 'why' they make certain buying decisions to best inform mobile brands about their audiences." Contact us today!