US marketers are expected to spend roughly $100 billion on digital advertising this year, with more than half of those transactions occurring programmatically (source: eMarketer). This growth in programmatic adoption is great news for marketers who have been clamoring for a scalable alternative to siloed data platforms in their people-based marketing initiatives. Unfortunately, the speed with which marketing buys are transacted now often outpaces the speed with which relevant data can be delivered to buying platforms -meaning omnichannel personalization quickly devolves into rapid-fire uninformed decision-making.
With that very issue top of mind, Experian is excited to announce Audience Informed Media, the first near-real-time, omnichannel audience activation platform for people-based programmatic media. Audience Informed Media represents a shift from the traditional hub-and-spoke data activation model the industry has relied upon for the last 15 years. Instead of syncing and syndicating cookies out to countless buy-side platforms, marketers can now manage audience targeting logic via a universal data layer that lives between their existing DSPs and publishers’ SSPs. This framework moves both identity and attribute data closer to the point of customer interactions, eliminating lag in audience onboarding/activation times, reducing data loss, and increasing the overall efficiency of the media transaction process.
Data owners and marketers now have a privacy-compliant mechanism to create, activate and update people-based and household-based audiences in near real-time, removing one of the few remaining barriers to timely, meaningful consumer interactions at scale.
Audience Informed Media FAQ
Q: How does the Audience Informed Media platform actually work?
A. Audience Informed Media utilizes a form of supply-path optimization called bid enrichment, allowing data owners and marketers to create universal, audience-based private marketplaces capable of functioning across any DSP, SSP, publisher or inventory type.
A marketer loads device-, person- or household-level audience data to the platform and creates custom targeting segments. These audience segments are assigned a unique Deal ID, and then represented across the programmatic marketplace for buyers to target via the DSPs of their choosing.
The Deal ID filters out all non-relevant auction inventory from existing SSPs and publishers, and surfaces only bid-requests that meet the most up-to-date audience profiles and targeting criteria.
Q: What are the benefits of bid enrichment?
A. Bid enrichment more closely aligns known audience demand with available inventory supply, benefiting all participants in the programmatic value chain.
- Agencies and advertisers gain access to near real-time, self-serve audience activation & management with seamless people-based reporting across platforms
- Data providers gain a real-time solution to deliver their audience data directly to buyers in a privacy compliant fashion, with native tools to support usage monitoring and client invoicing
- As are result of bringing this new and unique demand, publishers & SSPs earn higher yield in programmatic channels due to increased bid density and fill rates
- Lastly, DSPs see increased efficiency in the auctions they listen to and an increase in revenue as data is bundled into the sale of the inventory
Q: What type of data are you using to enrich the bid stream?
A. Experian’s proprietary identity assets underpin the audience matching and enrichment process, and thus Audience Informed Media is particularly focused on the timely activation of person and household addressable audience segments. These segments can be built from Experian’s ConsumerView data, or any combination of other 1st and 3rd party data sets.
Q: Is this limited to certain inventory types?
A. Not at all. The platform is designed to support audience targeting across all inventory types, from traditional environments such as display, video and in-app, to emerging programmatic channels like advanced TV, audio, and out-of-home.
Q: How is this different from reselling?
A. Experian’s approach to bid enrichment is in no way analogous to inventory arbitrage, where non-value-add players insert themselves between buyers and sellers, extracting profit and reducing overall performance.
Audience Informed Media operates with transparency, representing the original publisher/seller relationship in an enriched auction. Enriched auctions simply augment the original auction in two ways: 1) the appending of relevant Deal IDs for each end buyer, and 2) the inventory price adjustment necessary to cover any data usage fees imposed by an audience data provider for use of their segments in targeting.
Through the bundling of data and inventory, Audience Informed Media helps marketers reach their goal of seamless people-based marketing at scale.
Q: What are the implications for pricing and yield management?
A. Pricing is flexible with Audience Informed Media. Sellers can utilize fixed-rate, pre-negotiated terms with a floor price, or via open-RTB (with or without a floor price). Specific terms can be determined on a case-by-case basis.
Q: Is this GDPR compliant?
A. For data coming out of or passing through the EU, Experian is responsible for gaining user consent for that data’s collection, storage, and further processing – and sharing that consent (and any eventual changes to that consent) with all data processors. Our partner, BidSwitch, is also committed to ensuring all processes and protocols are in place by May 25, 2018 to ensure compliance with GDPR.
Want to learn more about Experian’s Audience Informed Media platform? Interested in being a beta participant? Please complete our brief form.