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
It’s the holiday season! For some, this is the time of year for family, friends and reflection. For the other 97 percent* of us, it’s time to shop! America’s obsession with Black Friday, Cyber Monday and the rest of the holiday shopping season has never been stronger. Or weaker? Or something? All I know is that you should be skeptical of anything you see regarding the Thanksgiving weekend performance. And now, I will tell you about the Thanksgiving weekend performance We’re not discussing revenue in this post. Instead, we’ll dive into the weekend’s email subject lines – more specifically, how “percent off” deals affected email open rates. As everyone knows, Black Friday and Cyber Monday are the days for deals. Juicy “percent off” offers motivate customers to buy, buy, buy. But is the conventional wisdom, that “a deep discount will get people to engage with my brand,” actually right? A few weeks ago, my counterpart in the UK published an analysis of how percentage off discounts influence open rates. Taking the cue from Karl, I wanted to expand this analysis into the U.S. market, paying special attention to Thanksgiving weekend. To begin, I gathered data on a few thousand mailings from our largest retail clients. To determine the baseline expected open rates, I averaged each brand’s performance in the 6 weeks prior to Black Friday. I then analyzed all the mailings sent on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, dividing the subject lines based on the appearance of a percentage off offer. Interestingly, percentage off offers were less prominent than I expected: And when percentages off were present… their values were all over the place: Higher volume doesn’t lead to improved performance Conventional wisdom would suggest that advertising a discount more frequently would lead to better performing discounts. The data, however, doesn’t support that idea. When I looked at volume distribution and relative performance for each advertised discount, I found a relatively strong negative correlation of -0.63. So the more frequently a discount was advertised, the worse it tended to perform. We can see this visually in the chart below: On average, advertising discounts did not significantly improve open rates. What happened? The first thing to note here is the wide spread in the data – some percentage off discounts worked very well! Overall, though, shouting about a discount wasn’t what convinced customers to open emails during the holidays. But maybe it wasn’t just the percentage off discounts that faltered this season – perhaps all opens were down? As you can see in the histogram above – this wasn’t the case. The average mailing not touting a percentage off discount did ever so slightly better than the baseline average. Still, the spread of data is very wide, with a lot of variation in results. It could be that the dispersion of results was a product of each brand’s initial baseline; brands that normally had great engagement would see positive gains for percentage off discounts while brands with poor engagement would see little to negative lifts, or vice versa. But this hypothesis was also proven incorrect, as the relative starting place for each brand versus the discount performances had a correlation approaching zero. No matter which way I sliced it, the performance of discounted subject lines were more or less random. Ultimately, this last point is the most important. The subject line, for all its ubiquity and focus, is probably a lot less influential than we tend to believe. Sure, a subject line can be optimized, carefully crafted to invoke the greatest lift in response possible, but the baseline expected performance is influenced by a much larger conversation – the one between the brand and its customers. If the brand relationship has been cultivated and refined through intelligent interactions and sophisticated targeting, the open rate is likely going to be higher. If every marketing message simply shouts, DISCOUNT, DISCOUNT, DISCOUNT, and there is no larger value-add, engagement probably won’t be great. Advertising a discount in a subject line might really help get people involved – or it might not. So what is the future of the subject line? Are they worth the disproportionate time and energy that marketing organizations tend to spend on them? Or should we recognize that their importance is probably minimal? The truth is, it’s a little bit of both. Subject lines are important – they are the first impression and often the first interaction of the day with a customer. But their importance is likely inversely related to the strength of the brand (the “from” line, if you will). The stronger the relationship is, the less important the subject line becomes. Maybe that’s the ideal – a perfect “from” name, one that tells you more about what’s inside the message than a subject line ever could. *Not a real stat Connect with Jacob Davis, Senior Analyst, on Twitter: @davisj2007.
Before we get to the gift guides, here’s a brief update on the hottest products from the week including Cyber Monday. This week’s biggest movers and new additions to the list are a clear sign that Christmas is upon us. “Star Shower,” a laser light that bathes your house in festive lights without having to untangle cords, jumped to second place, up 49 rank points from the week prior. Likewise, the return of “Elf on the Shelf” to the hot products list coincides with his return to the homes of children nationwide. Otherwise, things seems to have stabilized with Fitbit showing no signs of falling from first place and Pie Face game being this year’s sensation. Toys Shopkins remains the toy to beat this season followed by Pie Face game, which remained in second place after skyrocketing interest during the week of Thanksgiving. Toys new to the top 10 this week include some old favorites like the Easy Bake Oven and Paw Patrol toys as well as the new entrant Glammin Salon Vanity. Keep checking back each week for the latest hot toys. This chart shows the 10 most searched for toys and games based on search clicks to Toys “R” Us – USA. Gift guide insight When it comes to buying presents for the holidays, some individuals are easy to shop for while others require a bit of inspiration. And when consumers need inspiration, consumers turn to the Web. Searches for “gifts for,” “gift guide” and “gift ideas” grow increasingly common as we get closer and closer to Christmas with peak search activity around this topic typically observed during the last full week before Christmas, which this year would be the week ending Saturday December 19th. Some of the most common gift recipients mentioned in gift guide-related searches are: “men,” “guys,” “her,” “mom,” “dad” and “girlfriend.” But shoppers are also frequently looking for suggestions on the perfect gift for someone very specific interests, such as “hunters,” “gamers” and “beer lovers” as well as specific types of gifts, like “tech” or “personalized.” The following gift guide insights, derived using our new AudienceView platform, were designed to highlight for you, as a marketer, the interests and preferences of key consumer segments so that you can more effectively tailor your campaigns to be more relevant and engaging. But if it also helps you, as a consumer, come up with the perfect gift for that hard-to-shop-for person in your life, then even better! Each gift guide contains a representative mix of search terms that were performed at above average rates by each audience segment during the four weeks ending November 28, 2015. They include a mix of product and retail brands and provide a good idea of the interests, style preferences and lifestyles of each audience. Learn more about how AudienceView can deliver unparalleled insights into your consumer audience so that you can deliver a better brand experience.
It’s October, and you know what that means; leaves are changing, sweaters are being pulled out of the closet, pumpkin-flavored items are taking over coffee shops. For many marketers, this is the most exciting (and stressful) part of the year. Holiday marketing is ramping up, and it will only increase in intensity as the weeks go on. Luckily, we’re hard at work here at Experian, analyzing data from past holiday seasons to bring you the insights you need to make your holiday marketing programs successful. We’ve examined search and email behavior to compile a list of the most important days to email and trends that will help you delight your customers from now until the New Year. You can access all of these insights in our Holiday 2015 Marketing Insights Calendar, which covers marketing trends from October through December. Holiday marketing tips for October With Halloween fast approaching at the end of the month (and Thanksgiving/Black Friday/Cyber Monday not far behind), marketers should use October to solidify their plan for the holiday season. Here are three things you can do to optimize your impact this month: 3 ways to optimize your holiday marketing programs in October Target reactivation campaigns to last year’s holiday-only shoppers to maximize active subscribers this season Perform a data cleanse and email verification to ensure message delivery. List health is key to a successful holiday season, and now is the time to double check. Consider offering Halloween-specific products for the little ones. Costumes for newborns and toddlers are on the rise, so don’t forget about the youngsters! Want more holiday marketing insights? Don’t miss our upcoming webinar, Check your list twice: Last-minute marketing strategies for the holiday season.