It’s no secret that the COVID-19 Delta variant is threatening holiday plans across the country. As CDC mandates change and the flu season matures, we’re asking big questions that impact businesses and marketers across the country: Will customers mostly stay at home and order online? Or will people drive to the store and fly to family gatherings? The answer is probably both—but, as we’ve learned, a lot can change overnight. And we want to be prepared this time around. While many of us make vacation plans with a “wait and see” attitude, we want firmer footing at work. To cope with uncertainty, holiday marketing strategies straddle assumptions and require agility. To protect some of the biggest campaigns of the year, marketers need the ability to: Monitor changing customer behaviors during flu season. Track marketing KPIs for campaign performance and quick adaptability. Pivot audience targeting strategy when safety guidelines change. We built Discovery Platform to give you all three so that you can execute your marketing strategy with confidence. Discovery is built on top of robust consumer data and the best-in-class Identity graph that Experian is known for. It offers turn-key activation capability to keep your marketing campaigns agile and efficient this holiday season. Here’s how you can use Discovery Platform to protect your marketing interests from rapidly changing safety guidelines. Track store traffic against competitors Discovery Platform enables Experian clients to keep a tap on their store traffic and relate it to how competitors and overall business category is doing.  Monitoring these trends can help marketers adapt to changing consumer behaviors as flu season evolves. Track marketing KPIs Tracking and adjusting ongoing campaign targeting strategy remains a top priority throughout the pandemic, especially during colder, winter months. Discovery enables you to evaluate your campaign targeting strategy in relation with your loyalty card shoppers and in-flight campaign KPIs to drive higher return on ad spend and Customer Lifetime Value. With Discovery’s OmniImpact integration clients can even conduct control test measurement studies. Pivot campaigns quickly You can use Discovery’s Audience Engine integration to build and deploy custom audiences to social, digital, email and Connected TV partners. This gives you the ability to quickly pivot campaign channels once you detect changes in consumer behavior or dips in campaign performance. The sales and customer data flowing into Discovery Platform puts all the insights you need in one place to inform your team’s next marketing strategy. Watch our Discovery Platform demo or contact us to learn how Experian can help you create more effective, agile marketing campaigns for the holidays.

Email hashing was originally intended to be used as an email security feature that has ended up being a very powerful marketing tool. A hashed email is a cryptographic function that changes an email address to a random code which can be used as an anonymous customer identifier. This code is privacy-safe and cannot be traced back to the customer’s email address. However, this hashed email can function like a digital passport that traces every behavior and action a customer takes when logged into an account that is authenticated with an email, making hashed emails a goldmine for customer data. Today emails are used across traditional publishers and within the CTV ecosystem; tying them to more consumer touch points than ever before. Why the emphasis now? Cookies are on their way out the door and have been the primary way that many marketers have tracked their existing and potential customers. In order to replace this granular level of data, marketers are likely going to need multiple solutions. With so many cookieless solutions and IDs appearing in the marketplace, the mapping of the customer journey is bound to be fragmented. Relying on first-party data, such as hashed email, is just one way to reduce that fragmentation; as it can serve as an authenticated starting point for cross-device identity resolution that can be leveraged for targeting, personalization and measurement. How can Tapad + Experian help? Tapad + Experian's Hashed Email Onboarding is a privacy-safe way to connect consumer email addresses to their related digital devices and other digital identifiers through high precision probabilistic identity. By onboarding hashed emails and incorporating them within your Tapad Graph file you can: Build a more holistic view of individuals and households and their relationship to email addresses in your first-party data set Leverage these relationships for increased cross-device scale for targeting Employ personalization tactics at the household or individual level across devices Create new audience segments and look-alike models for cross-channel activation Design more inclusive measurement and attribution for customer journey mapping Tapad, a part of Experian has built a hashed email onboarding product feature that works with the existing flexibility of The Tapad Graph to deliver the most holistic consumer view, combined with the attributes you need, in the structure that works best for your business objectives. Get started with The Tapad Graph For personalized consultation on the value and benefits of The Tapad Graph for your business, email Sales@tapad.com today!     

The result of epic shifts from traditional cable to streaming television, the CTV ecosystem is experiencing compounded fragmentation, making it challenging for marketers to leverage in the most effective way for both activation and measurement. Heralded as the hot new household level device for highly engaged viewers, CTV brings massive opportunities for brands to move users down the funnel and incorporate CTV into their attribution modeling post-campaign. Leveraging CTV IDs within a cross-device identity resolution strategy can yield big benefits if you know how to do it right. Check out our breakdown of today’s CTV landscape to help you better understand how and what you can leverage for activation and measurement in the streaming-verse today. CTV Ecosystems as identifiers (for illustrative purposes only) This is just a small peak at the players and complexities of CTV IDs available for marketers today, but it illustrates the need to understand what IDs can benefit your strategies and where you can use them. Addressability and attribution Not all CTV devices and IDs are addressable; or have ad slots for biddable inventory for advertisers. For example, Apple TV devices and Apple TV + are not ad supported, but could still appear within an identity graph for measurement purposes; helping understand customer behavior and habits, which can inform marketing strategies. Having a household to individual view that's as inclusive as possible can provide valuable insights. CTV identity strategy Whether or not CTV devices or apps are addressable for advertisers, they can bring immense value when leveraged as part of a holistic identity resolution strategy. As a household level device with user authentication it can provide marketers a top-down view; unlocking household:individual targeting opportunities and unification of IDs at both levels for frequency management and customer journey mapping Get started with us Tapad, part of Experian, offers CTV ID onboarding and extension to our CTV ID Universe as a part of The Tapad Graph suite of products. To learn more about how The Tapad Graph can support your business objectives through future-proof identity resolution visit Tapad.com or email sales@tapad.com to connect with a representative today.

Third-party data has become the cornerstone to improve marketing effectiveness across all types of online and offline media. Consumer packaged goods (CPG) marketing faces a challenge when utilizing this data, as sales are often made through distributors such as grocery stores or mass merchandisers rather than directly to consumers.  Without customer data files that can be enriched for insight, CPG companies often base marketing decisions on custom market positioning studies, surveys and generic consumer personas. These solutions can be quite expensive and prove difficult to develop a targeted marketing program.  Optimize your CPG marketing strategy We have a team of experts that leverage the wealth of our database of thousands of attributes covering more than 300 million U.S. consumers and 130 million U.S. households—to identify the demographics and attitudes of a CPG target consumer using syndicated, mobile location, social media, and online behavioral data.  We help connect various data points to provide CPG marketers with the ability to identify likely consumers, generate actionable marketing insight, and enable targeted advertising to these consumers that increases brand awareness and drives purchase behavior.  Identifying likely consumers for consumer packaged goods  To gain marketing insight about your customers, 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.  Experian uses syndicated and digital actions data to identify these consumers and understand their characteristics. With digital actions data, we leverage search terms and landing pages relevant to your brand. We use our linking capabilities to identify the perfect target audience for your marketing initiatives.   For example, we leveraged syndicated data that showed consumer preference for frozen meals based on household characteristics. This enabled our client to better understand the market size and attributes of its active consumers.  Actionable CPG marketing insight  Once marketers identify who their optimal target consumer is, they can begin to understand their ideal audience and compare it to consumers of competitive brands. This helps identify key demographics and psychographics that over-index to users of the brands compared to the population.  As a result, you can gain a much better understanding of the demographics, life stage and lifestyle of your target consumer. We also help you to better inform your marketing communication and media and distribution strategies by identifying the channels your ideal audience is most likely to be found.   Getting back to our example, consumers of frozen foods were found more likely to be females between the ages of 35-54 with busy families. They had multiple children in the home and participated in family activities, like zoos and fast-food dining.  We were then able to identify the digital channels they were more actively engaged with and determine factors that influence their decision-making, such as product quality or consumer testimonials.   By gaining insight into your target audience, you can create digital communication focused on specifics, like an active family looking for a quality meal.    Turning insights into action by enabling targeted advertising  With a better understanding of your target consumer, and the insight needed to catch their attention, you can unify your ideal target audience and serve advertising that builds brand awareness and increases conversion.  Our Custom Analytics team uses advanced analytical techniques to create custom consumer personas. Our database of 130 million U.S. households is scored with a proprietary algorithm created specifically for your organization and creates audiences that are pushed to the preferred marketing channel of your target consumers.  Leveraging our ConsumerView database, we can easily enable direct communication to your targeted consumers (such as our example that identified consumers of frozen food and their preferred channels) through direct mail, email, digital display, social media and mobile channels.  We work directly with agencies to deploy an audience to a destination and can manage a campaign for our CPG clients.  We can even help you determine campaign success by measuring campaign performance versus a relevant control, and profiles converters to help you see gains made in brand awareness to target consumers.  These services give you the ability to test an advertisement directly to targeted consumers, measure the effectiveness of the advertisement, then plow back the learnings into future campaigns, enabling greater consumer brand awareness and conversion while managing marketing effectiveness.  Experian is here to help  We have worked extensively with a variety of CPG companies to improve marketing effectiveness and drive brand awareness. We can help your organization take your marketing campaigns to the next level. Our data assets and advanced analytics generate actionable insights that enable you to identify and communicate with consumers more effectively.  For more information about how we can help your organization gain valuable insights to identify your ideal customers and the best channels to reach them, contact us.   

Study reveals that brands with more mature identity programs were significantly more likely to be successful in achieving their key objectives Tapad, a part of Experian, a global leader in cross-device digital identity resolution and a part of Experian, has commissioned Forrester Consulting, part of a leading research and advisory firm, to conduct a new study that evaluates the current state of customer data-driven marketing and explores how marketers can use identity solutions to deliver privacy safe and engaging experiences, in an evolving data landscape. The study highlights the changing ground rules for digital marketing and the threat that poses to marketers’ ability to deliver against long standing KPIs and campaign goals. Nearly two-thirds (62%) of respondents said that the forces of data deprecation will have a significant (40%) or critical (21%) impact on their marketing strategies over the next two years. Among those surveyed, identity resolution strategies have surfaced as an opportunity to create more powerful customer experiences, with 66% aiming to have it help improve customer trust and implement more ethical data collection and use practices, while nearly 60% believe it will point the way to more effective personalization and data management practices. Although organizations are eager to implement identity resolution strategies, a complex web of solutions and partners makes execution a challenge. For example, respondents report using at least eight identity solutions on average, across nearly six vendor partners, and they expect that fragmentation to persist in the ‘cookieless’ future. Additionally, brands’ identity resolution technologies typically represent a patchwork of homegrown and commercial solutions. Eighty-one percent of respondents use both in-house and commercial identity resolution tools today, and 47% use a near-equal blend of the two. Despite the challenges, many brands have the foundation for a strong identity resolution strategy in place, and they are thriving as a result. Specifically, more mature brands were 79% more successful at improving privacy safeguards to reduce regulatory and compliance risk, 247% more successful at improving marketing ROI, and over four times more effective at improving customer trust compared to their low-maturity peers. Additional insights include: Marketers Are Increasingly Playing a Key Strategic Role Within the Organization, But There is a Mandate to Demonstrate Value. Nearly three-quarters of respondents in our study agree the marketing function is more strategically important to their organization than it used to be, while almost two-thirds agree there’s more pressure than ever to prove the ROI or business performance of their activities.   Consumers Expect Brands to Deliver Engaging Experiences Across Highly Fragmented Journeys: Tapad, a part of Experian found that 72% of respondents agree that customers demand more relevant, personalized experiences at the time and place of their choosing. At the same time, 67% of respondents recognize that customer purchase journeys take place over more touchpoints and channels than ever, and 59% of respondents agree that those journeys are less predictable and linear than they once were.   Marketing Runs on Data, But the Rules Governing Customer Data Usage are Ever-Evolving: According to the study, 70% of decision-makers agree that consumer data is the lifeblood of their marketing strategies – fueling the personalized, omnichannel experiences customers demand. At the same time, 69% of respondents recognize that customers are increasingly aware of how their data is being used. At least two-thirds agree that data deprecation, including tighter restrictions on data use (66%), as well as operating system and browser changes impacting third-party cookies (68%) means that legacy marketing strategies are unlikely to remain viable in the long-term.“ Our latest survey findings give us a better understanding of how our customers and other companies around the world are trying to master the relationship between people, their data and their devices,” said Mark Connon, General Manager at Tapad, a part of Experian. “This research shows why it's fundamental for the industry to continuously work to develop solutions that are agnostic. Tapad, a part of Experian has worked tirelessly to deliver on this with our Tapad Graph, and by introducing solutions like Switchboard to help the evolving ecosystem and in turn helping customers reap the benefits of better identity in both short and long-term.” The study is founded on an online survey of over 300 decision-makers at global brands and agencies, which was fielded from March to April, 2021. Data deprecation and identity are fast-developing, moving targets, so this study delivers targeted insights and recommendations for how to prepare for coming shifts in customer data strategies – whether they manifest tomorrow or a year from now. Get started with The Tapad Graph   For personalized consultation on the value and benefits of The Tapad Graph for your business, email Sales@tapad.com today!  

Marketers are always challenged to expand sales beyond “business as usual,” while being good stewards of company resources spent on marketing. Every additional dollar spent on marketing is expected to yield incremental earnings—or else that dollar is better spent elsewhere. You must be able to determine return on advertising spend (ROAS) for any campaign or platform you add to your marketing mix. A key driver of positive ROAS is incremental customer actions produced by ad exposure. Confident, accurate measurement of incremental actions is the goal of an effective testing program. Why do we test campaign performance? Because demonstrating incremental actions from a campaign is a victory. You can keep winning by doing more of the same. Not finding sufficient incremental actions is an opportunity to reallocate resources and consider new tactics. Uncertainty whether the campaign produced incremental actions is frustrating. Ending a profitable marketing program because incremental actions were not effectively measured is tragic. Test for success When you apply rigorous methods to test the performance of campaigns, you can learn to make incremental improvements in campaign performance. The design of a marketing test requires the following: Customer Action to be measured during the test. This action indicates a recognizable step on the path to purchase: awareness, evaluation, inquiry, comparison of offers or products, or a purchase. Treatment, i.e., exposure to a brand’s ad during a campaign. Prediction regarding the relationship between action and treatment (e.g., Ad exposure produces an increase in purchase likelihood). Experimental design is the structure you will create within your marketing campaign to carry out the test. Review of results and insights.   Selecting a customer action to measure Make sure that the customer action you measure in your test is: Meaningful to the campaign’s goal. What is the primary goal of the campaign? Is it brand awareness? Web site visits? Inquiries? Completed sales? An engagement by the customer. Your measurement should capture meaningful, deliberate interaction of consumers with the brand. Attributable to advertising. There should be a reasonable expectation that ad exposure should increase, or perhaps influence the nature of customer actions. Abundant in the data. Customer action should be a) plentiful and b) have a high probability of being recorded during the ad campaign (in other words, a high match rate between actions and the audience members). Selecting campaign treatments It is best for treatments to be as specific as possible. Ad exposures should be comparable with respect to: brand and offer, messaging, call to action, and format. Making a prediction This is the “hypothesis.” Generally, you assume that exposure to advertising will influence customer actions. To do this, you need to reject the conclusion that exposure does NOT affect actions (the “null hypothesis”). Elements of an experimental design An attribution method that links each audience to their purchase action during the test. This consists of a unique identifier of the prospect which can be recognized both in records of the audience and records of the measured action during the measurement period. A target audience that receives ad exposure. A control audience that does not receive ad exposure. It provides a crucial baseline measurement of action against which the target audience is compared. Time boundaries for measurement, related to the treatment: Pre-campaign Campaign Post-campaign Randomly selected audiences (recommended) Some audience platforms, such as direct mail and addressable television operators, feature the ability to select distinct audience members in advance. Randomly selected audiences can generally be assumed to be similar in all respects except ad exposure. The lift of the action rate is simple to calculate: Campaign Lift = (Action Rate (target) / Action Rate (control)) -1 Non-randomly selected audiences are more difficult, but still possible, to measure effectively. There may be inherent biases between them that may or may not be obvious. To measure campaign performance, we must first account for any pre-existing differences in customer actions, and then adjust for these when measuring the effect of ad exposure. Typically, the pre-campaign period (and possibly the post-campaign period as well) are used to obtain a baseline comparison of actions between the two audiences. This is a “difference of differences” measurement: Baseline lift = (Action Rate (target) / Action Rate (control)) -1 Campaign Lift = (Action Rate (target) / Action Rate (control)) -1 Net campaign lift (advertising effect) = Campaign Lift – Baseline Lift Analyzing results and insights How large is the lift? This is generally expressed as a percentage increase in action rate for the target audience vs. the control audience. Are we confident that the lift is real, and not just random noise in the data? This question is answered with the “confidence level.”. 95% confidence means the probability of a “true positive” result is 95%; and the probability of a “false positive” due to random error is 5%. What was the campaign cost per incremental action? If you also know the expected revenue from each incremental action, you can project out incremental revenue, from which you can calculate return on ad spend. Other insights: Do the results make directional sense (we would hope that ad exposure will cause an increase in customer actions, not a decrease)? Does action rate generally increase with the number of ad exposures? Summary Well-designed testing and measurement practices allow you to learn from individual advertising campaigns to improve decision-making. The ability to draw confident conclusions from campaigns will allow experimentation with different strategies, tactics, and communication channels to maximize performance. These test-and-learn strategies also enhance your ability to adjust to marketplace trends by monitoring campaign performance. To learn how Experian’s solutions can help you measure the success of your marketing campaigns, watch our short video, or explore our measurement solutions.

As kids are packing their new backpacks and heading back to school, search trends and online behavior give insights about the things students (and their parents) care about this year.

Third-party cookies have been a crucial component in people-based advertising and digital identity. With Google's recent announcement of delaying third-party cookie deprecation to 2024, the industry has more time to rethink how to effectively identify and communicate with consumers when the time comes. Preparing for cookie deprecation  Solving for the post-cookie world is mission critical, particularly as consumer expectation for a relevant digital experience is heightened. We’ve seen a number of industry participants, including brands, publishers, data providers and technology platforms, work around the clock to find an alternative to third-party cookies—one that amasses the same scale and reach but also maintains consumer privacy.  In fact, industry insights echo that sentiment. According to a white paper from Winterberry Group, Collaborative Data Solutions: The Evolution of Identity in a Privacy-First, Post-Cookie World, sponsored in part by Experian, one of the most frequently heard comments was the urgency for the industry to develop post-cookie, privacy compliant solutions that work in a more integrated manner.  And if there was one overarching position regarding the research into the future of identity, it’s that collaboration is key. Participants in the white paper expressed that with the elimination of third-party cookies, there will be a surge in collaborative solutions across and within companies to accommodate changes in the digital marketplace. Collaborative data solutions must move beyond new post-cookie identity replacements and encompass more holistic approaches, including first-party data.  First-party data sharing   Currently, 64.3 percent of organizations in the US collaborate with other organizations to share first-party data for insights, activation, measurement or attribution, and 16.7 percent in the U.S. have plans to. Virtually all US companies surveyed were aware of the option to collaborate with other organizations and expressed openness to discussions around sharing first-party data.  What is the solution to third-party cookie deprecation?   The deprecation of third-party cookies is creating a shock in the marketing and advertising world because there has been an over-dependence on one type of identifier. Therefore, the solution to identify consumers across the digital ecosystem will not come from a single replacement for third-party cookies. Instead, it will rely on a combination of solutions, including collaborative data between organizations and implementation of proprietary first-party data strategies, as well as a framework that can connect all these touchpoints together.  Experian can help you navigate the cookieless future   Experian is focused on building a more effective advertising ecosystem that promotes the interoperability of digital touchpoints while enabling and fostering new innovations in a privacy forward way. Contact us today and get started with building connected identity in the ever-changing data landscape. To learn more, watch the recording of our webinar with The Vitamin Shoppe where we discuss identity and how you can drive more addressable audience strategies amidst diminishing data signals.   

As today’s digital landscape gets more and more complicated there are more ways for brands to connect with users and drive purchases and more ways for ad tech to target and measure those touch points. As in-person shopping picks up steam due to the re-normalization of society post-COVID 19; the connection between digital ads and in-person purchases needs to be made once again. With the rise of Connected TV throughout the pandemic there are even more digital opportunities to target a user. But how do you make sure that those brand engagements are captured and correctly attributed to offline purchases and conversions? The answer lies in a holistic identity resolution strategy. Cross-device identity resolution with The Tapad Graph connects the identifiers and devices of individuals within a household to each other; enabling targeting, frequency capping, extension, segmentation and measurement or attribution between devices; including Connected TV and hashed (privacy-protected) email addresses along with Cookies, Mobile Ad Ids and IP Address. Brands can join their first-party data to The Tapad Graph to execute strategies that connect online and offline data for pre, mid and post-campaign efficiencies. Let’s imagine a scenario in which an outdoor retail brand is targeting users watching specific content on a Connected TV device. Powered by identity resolution, they start with a general ad on CTV and continue targeting down individual paths with each user. When one of them converts in store and makes a purchase; the outdoor retailer can connect that action through location and in-store traffic data with the cross-device identity resolution used to execute the digital campaign. Now the actions of the user online and offline are resolved for more accurate measurement and attribution after the campaign ends. But it doesn’t stop there-- the brand's CRM data can be reactivated for the next digital campaign and leveraged to capitalize on the most effective media mix for the user who made the purchase previously. These combined insights can be invaluable in shaping up future campaign strategies with geo-contextual ads, recommended additional products and personalization to help drive more conversions and purchases in-store or online. As in-person shopping picks back up and marketers are tasked once again with balancing online and in-store KPIs, the right identity resolution strategy can unlock necessary efficiencies for retailers, ad tech vendors and agencies tasked with supporting these initiatives. Get started with The Tapad Graph   For personalized consultation on the value and benefits of The Tapad Graph for your business, email Sales@tapad.com today!