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
The 2013 Digital Marketer Report is almost here. In anticipation of its release, here’s an excerpt from the online display advertising section: Here’s what marketers and advertisers need in order to lay the groundwork for success in their online advertising campaigns: Solid audience-based data is the foundation for display advertising success. Start with your CRM file and work with the right partners who can best leverage it and enhance your audience definition with robust data assets to create a highly targeted display audience. Actionable, value-based segmentation is a key campaign driver. Value-based segmentation assigns predicted economic values to customer or prospect audience targets – based upon the campaign objective – for the more cost-efficient real time display ad buying. Applying value-based segmentation to an audience according to sound consumer insights and analytics allows for more dynamic and cost-effective display media bidding. Scalability to drive campaign efficiency. You’ve defined your target audience with value-based segments. Now you need to reach that specific audience at scale to maximize campaign efficiency and get the most from your media budget. High-quality creative to drive engagement and conversion. Developing the right audience, targeting parameters and media strategy is only as good as the creative message displayed so the importance of highly relevant, targeted creative cannot be underestimated. Work with a partner who understands your target audience and campaign objectives to develop and deliver the most compelling message. Approaching your online display campaign set up this way will ensure it is built on a solid foundation, greatly increasing the likelihood of your program’s success. Keep in mind that data-driven, audience-based campaigns typically take a little more ramp-up time than more traditional advertising. Sometimes, if companies don’t see results right away, they might change or abandon their strategy too quickly. This new, digital path truly requires a shift in advertiser behavior and thinking. All is not lost if you don’t see results right out of the gate. The systems need time to use the data to target the best audience, hone in on the right media for that audience and bid on it accurately. All of these steps take time but are needed to drive performance. Marketers in the trenches may get comfortable as they start to see results, but they sometimes struggle with getting their senior leadership to accept the longer time frame and keep spending on display programs. Brand advertisers tend to buy into display better than performance-based advertisers because they are used to the time required to create repeated exposure that builds awareness, consideration, favorability and intent. The key takeaway is that you need to go into these campaigns feeling comfortable about the longer timeline required to allow traction and drive the results you seek. Pre-order The 2013 Digital Marketer Report today and be one of the first to get more great data, trends and insights.
In 2013 and beyond, marketers will have to work even harder to gain and maintain position in organic search results. They’ll also need to spend more effectively on paid search ads by knowing how their target customers use search, and by applying insight into their behaviors and attitudes to plan and execute better content and campaigns. Here’s an excerpt on the search landscape from the upcoming 2013 Digital Marketer Report: Five Websites captured 20 percent of all search activity in Q4 2012, while the top 500 captured nearly 50 percent. Expansion to the top 1,000 Websites reached nearly 75 percent, highlighting the challenges for marketers to reach potential customers through search, even for those with a large Web presence. Top five Websites to capture search clicks Websites Domain Q4 2012 – share of search clicks Facebook www.facebook.com 8.48% YouTube www.youtube.com 5.55% Yahoo! www.yahoo.com 2.63% Wikipedia www.wikipedia.org 2.01% Amazon.com www.amazon.com 1.40% Source: Experian Marketing Services’ Hitwise Source: Experian Marketing Services’ Hitwise Even through paid search, the landscape changes very little — the top 10 Websites captured 16 percent of all paid search clicks, and the top 500 captured 56 percent. Top five Websites to capture paid search clicks Websites Domain Q4 2012 – share of paid search clicks Amazon www.amazon.com 4.19% eBay www.ebay.com 3.46% eHow www.ehow.com 2.44% BestBuy www.bestbuy.com 1.06% Yahoo! Shopping shopping.yahoo.com .85% Source: Experian Marketing Services’ Hitwise Source: Experian Marketing Services’ Hitwise Breaking through the clutter is key to reaching customers who are in the market for your product and services. Understanding who your ideal customers are can help to focus your search campaigns on these consumers and see greater campaign effectiveness. For more digital consumer insights, pre-order The 2013 Digital Marketer Report today.
With the New Year upon us, many Americans have turned to the Internet to help with their 2013 resolution of losing weight. According to Experian Marketing Services’ data, the most searched for diet was the “Paleo diet” for the week ending January 5, 2013. Searches for diets are one of the more predictable patterns on the Internet, with the high point always being the first of the year, and the low-point being around Thanksgiving week. Marketers can benefit from this trend by understanding and planning around the seasonality of this interest. Other top 10 searches that contained the term diet for last week included popular diets such as the Atkins diet, Gluten Free diet, and the 8-hour diet. Additional top 2013 diet searches included the Cabbage Soup diet, South Beach diet, Shred diet and the HCG diet. The Paleo diet, Gluten Free diet and Shred diet are all new to the top 10 list. Looking back at the same week in 2012 the Dash diet owned the #1 spot, and in 2011 the HCG diet was #1. The actual top overall search term this past week was Paula Deen diet, as she announced that she lost more than 30 pounds after revealing she had diabetes earlier in 2012. Interestingly enough, the term diabetic diet made the top 10 searches for the second straight year. Other trends we noticed include the continued popularity of low carb diets with the Paleo, Atkins, South Beach diets all taking top place in search term data. We’re also seeing the return of a religion based diet (the Jesus diet was popular in 2010) with the Daniel's diet among the top 20 searches in 2013. Many fad diets pop-up this time year usually with a time period attached – 2-day, 17-day or 3-day diets. So who is doing all the searching? Females accounted for 58% of diet searches this past week and households who earn between $30K-60K a year made up the majority of searches with 33%. The states with highest index of diet searches include: Delaware, North Dakota, Wyoming, Wisconsin and Nebraska. For more insights like this please follow us on twitter @ExperianMKT. Learn more about the author, Matt Tatham