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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Strong Revenue Performance and Thriving Culture Contribute to Industry Recognition NEW YORK, Sept. 15, 2016 /PRNewswire/ — Tapad, the leader in cross-device marketing technology and now a part of Experian, was named a top company on Inc. Magazine’s list of the 5000 fastest-growing private companies in the U.S. In addition, Tapad won the TMCnet 2016 Tech Culture Award. The exclusive Inc. 5000 ranking highlights the fastest-growing privately-held* companies in America. These distinguished companies have achieved success in strategy, service and innovation. TMCnet recognizes talented tech professionals who are committed to building a culture that prioritizes employee growth, collaboration and engagement. Tapad continues to broaden their presence into new markets, having launched in APAC earlier this year, as well as continuing their European expansion. Tapad’s proprietary technology, The Device Graph™ is leveraged by more marketers and brands to understand digital engagement across devices. The company’s rapidly expanding client base includes numerous Fortune 500 company brands as well as all four major advertising holding companies in the U.S. “We have an exceptional team of innovative people who are all working very hard to achieve the kind of results these publications are recognizing,” said Tapad CEO and Founder, Are Traasdahl. “Given that, we have an even greater responsibility to our talent to create an environment that fosters innovation and nurtures open communication. Ultimately, this is how we will continue to reach our very ambitious goals of becoming the world’s leading unified marketing technology provider.” Tapad’s award-winning work culture is defined by its gold-standard benefits which include a six-month parental leave policy, unlimited vacation time, company-sponsored meals and office space designed to facilitate collaboration and open communication. Tapad’s highly talented team has also received multiple customer service awards in 2016. These awards include the iMedia ASPY awards for Best Customer Service and Best Mobile Partner as well as recognition from The Communicator Awards of Excellence in Interactive Media. *Prior to Tapad’s acquisition by Telenor in February 2016. Contact us today!
The Tapad Device GraphTM Had Twice the Precision and Three Times the Scale as Next Competitor New York, September 14, 2016 – Just-released findings of a Hotels.com® study revealed that Tapad’s (part of Experian) cross-screen marketing technology achieved the highest levels of precision and scale among competitors. According to the leading online accommodation booking website, after a rigorous, three-and-a-half month vendor analysis, Tapad achieved twice the precision of the next highest-scoring cross-screen offering and three times greater scale. The two other companies evaluated were not named. Said Helene Cameron-Heslop, Senior Manager of Analytics of the Hotels.com brand, “Our team implemented an extremely rigorous vetting of open, cross-screen technology vendors. At the outset, we assumed we would have to compromise on either scale or accuracy – particularly given the importance to our brand of operating in a privacy-safe setting. We were surprised to find a complete package, but Tapad’s Device Graph won out on scale, accuracy and privacy; making our choice of partners very clear.” In another metric critical to the Hotels.com brand, The Tapad Device GraphTM was eight times more “unique” than the next closest offering, meaning Tapad’s graph was found to have a much greater number of connections not seen in any of the other graphs. In addition to precision, uniqueness and scale, the Tapad Device GraphTM was found to have: ● 100% higher recall● 47% more incremental matches● 53% higher North American market coverage● 101% higher F-Score* “A valuable cross-device solution should enable partners to get everything they’re looking for from a single vendor,” said Tapad Founder and CEO, Are Traasdahl. “We are deeply impressed with how thorough Hotels.com was in their vetting, and we confidently tackle the complex challenges of the martech industry thanks to our superior technology. Everyone loves a bake-off, and Tapad is no exception – delivering best-in-class results in areas that really count.” *F-score is a statistical measurement that takes precision and recall together. The calculation is 2*(precision*recall)/precision + recall). It gives you one number instead of two numbers to look at and judge performance. Contact us today