Have you wondered how the shift toward real-time data is reshaping the way companies connect with consumers? Traditional methods of third-party data collection and demographic targeting are being replaced by more privacy-conscious approaches. In our next Ask the Expert segment, we explore how Experian and Captify’s partnership is harnessing the power of real-time onsite search data to enhance personalized advertising, address identity fragmentation, and provide valuable insights for navigating modern advertising challenges.
We’re joined by industry leaders, Amelia Waddington, Chief Product Officer at Captify, and Chris Feo, Experian’s SVP of Sales & Partnerships. In this segment, they discuss the complexities of identity and the innovative use of real-time data in digital advertising. Watch the full Q&A below to learn more about these topics and discover how the collaborative efforts of Experian and Captify are shaping the future of personalized advertising.
Understanding the power of real-time marketing data
Real-time data provides an up-to-the-minute view of consumer behavior, enabling marketers to make quick, informed decisions. Captify’s use of real-time search data allows for immediate insights, contrasting with traditional third-party data, which often involves delay and prompted answers. This approach allows marketers to see trends and reactions as they unfold, making it possible to tweak campaigns and strategies and always reach the most in-market consumers. By using Captify’s real-time data, we can predict consumer interests and adapt to market changes quickly.
Staying ahead of market trends with predictive analytics
Captify analyzes more than a billion search signals daily, giving brands a detailed look at changes in audience behavior. These real-time insights help businesses make timely adjustments and reach their audiences in the moments that matter. Beyond digital media, Captify’s multi-channel activation strategy extends to platforms such as connected TV and digital out-of-home, ensuring messages remain relevant and effective.
How Experian and Captify work together
Imagine being able to tailor your ads to consumers’ needs and interests in real time. Our partnership with Captify enhances ad targeting and measurement by combining Experian’s vast Digital Graph with Captify’s real-time intent data. “Captify has evolved beyond relying on third-party cookies in isolation and now uses the Experian Graph to provide a more holistic view of identity at both the individual and household levels” says Amelia Waddington, Chief Product Officer at Captify.
As privacy concerns grow, we have built and continue to invest in a signal-agnostic Digital Graph that can make connections across a wide range of identifiers, including the Experian Living Unit ID (LUID). The LUID is a unique identifier representing each household in the United States, based on real households and real people. This allows essential demographic information to be enriched to a household, enriching first-party data with detailed consumer insights, like age, gender, historical purchase behavior, and future purchase intent. By continuously adding new data and building fresh audiences and segments, we provide greater insights into the consumer base. Our Digital Graph serves as Captify’s identity spine, allowing them to connect identifiers together at both the person and household levels. This helps their clients target ads more accurately across different channels, making it easier to track and understand consumer behavior across platforms like TV, digital, and radio.
Here are five key ways our partnership enhances ad targeting and measurement:
Enhancing personalized advertising with real-time insights
Identity fragmentation is a challenge for marketers because consumer data is scattered across different devices and platforms, making it difficult to effectively understand and target consumers. Experian and Captify’s partnership provides the fuel to help advertisers by integrating real-time search data with identity graphs, allowing for accurate targeting across various channels. By combining Experian’s robust Digital Graph with Captify’s real-time intent data, advertisers can deliver highly personalized ads on connected TV that retain their relevance and impact, no matter where the consumer engages with the content.
“We ingest the Experian Graph as part of our internal Graph, allowing us to connect identifiers together at both person and household levels, which aligns with our expansion into TV, out-of-home, and audio channels.”
Amelia waddington, chief product officer, captify
Addressing identity fragmentation
A fragmented identity occurs when consumer data is scattered across different devices and platforms, making it difficult to effectively understand and target consumers. Advertisers need holistic media plans instead of fragmented strategies that risk disengaging consumers, while publishers must demonstrate their platforms’ value by targeting seamlessly.
By enriching and distributing thousands of demographic and behavioral segments, Experian provides the essential data needed to effectively target diverse audiences. Experian’s Digital Graph complements Captify’s data by connecting various identifiers, providing a complete view of individuals and households. This approach helps advertisers overcome fragmentation challenges, and ensure their messages reach the right audience across multiple touchpoints.
Optimizing creative content dynamically
Using real-time data, advertisers can adjust creative elements of their ads to better match consumer interests. This means changing parts of an ad, like images or text, based on current audience data, making it more relevant to the consumer. By partnering with Experian, Captify continues to see a rounded view of a consumer, allowing them to provide clients around the globe with data-driven creatives. These creatives achieve better results than standard ones and enable more meaningful connections with consumers.
Integrating search data into connected TV
Real-time search data plays a crucial role in enhancing the effectiveness of connected TV (CTV) advertising. Captify’s identity solution uses persistent identifiers from the Experian Digital Graph to extract value from onsite search data. Machine learning technology then categorizes these searches to understand consumer intent and create highly relevant audiences. By integrating Captify’s consumer intent data, advertisers can deliver more targeted and relevant ads on CTV platforms. This integration helps marketers reach viewers with content that resonates.
Ensuring multi-channel message consistency
Consistency in messaging across multiple channels is key for maintaining brand integrity and consumer trust. By using Experian’s identity data, Captify ensures that advertisers can deliver cohesive messages across various platforms, including TV, digital, and radio. This integration not only enhances ad targeting precision but also solidifies the brand’s presence, ensuring that every touchpoint reinforces the same core message for a unified brand experience.
Watch the full Q&A
Visit our Ask the Expert content hub to watch Amelia and Chris’ full conversation. In their discussion, they cover identity beyond identifiers, personalized advertising strategies, and the evolving consumer journey. Amelia and Chris also share about interoperability challenges in CTV and how Captify is using alternative IDs like Unified I.D. 2.0 (UID2).
About our experts
Amelia Waddington, Chief Product Officer, Captify
Amelia is Chief Product Officer at Captify, leading the Product, Engineering, Partnerships and Insight teams globally. During her three years at Captify, Amelia has delivered on her product vision to put Captify’s Search Intelligence in the hands of all advertisers—unlocking competitive advantage for clients and partners in a way that’s omnichannel, strategic, open and future-proof. She has launched Captify’s Advanced TV, cookieless and data partnerships product lines. Amelia brings over a decade of experience in driving product strategy, underpinned by expertise across data science, machine learning, and analytics. She has a PhD in computational neuroscience and previous roles include product leadership at LiveRamp and Aimia.
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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Fluctuation in consumers' behaviors and preferences during the pandemic has prompted a shift in the practices and patterns that we are accustomed to. Powerful market forces are emerging as society builds a new normal, forcing marketers to rethink their strategy, activation, and measurement. It is important for marketers to understand the forces that influence the industry, and to learn about alternative approaches that can be applied to help reach their goals. In our recent webinar, ‘How to Adjust to the New World of Advertising,’ Experian’s Chris Feo and guest speaker Tina Moffett, Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, lead an in-depth discussion of the market dynamics and developments guiding us to this new era of advertising. They talked about: The pandemic changing consumer behavior Emerging media channels Data deprecation The pandemic and increased media consumption The pandemic caused seismic shifts in consumer behaviors and business operations. Work from home became the norm, consumers made drastic changes in their routines, and businesses had to adjust to new operating models as local economies shrank and supply chains strained. As stay-at-home orders were put into effect, consumers increased their media consumption drastically as more time was spent at home in front of their devices. According to Forrester, by June 2020, 48% of US online adults subscribed to at least one streaming service, while 34% had signed up for multiple. Forrester contends that: Social and online video/OTT will grow fastest among other categories of ad spend Connected TV outpaces other video advertising channels 55% of consumers plan to continue watching movies at home rather than in theatres after the pandemic Data deprecation The ways that marketers can personalize content and measure the effectiveness of campaigns is changing with data deprecation. Consumer preferences, regulations, and technology providers are evolving the way advertisers understand consumers, causing changes to existing identity-based marketing strategies. According to Forrester, 66% of marketers are investing in first-party data collection strategies to adapt to these market forces. Marketers need to adjust Demand for a new advertising approach Changes in consumer behavior, evolving media consumption patterns, and data deprecation have marketers looking at new approaches to targeting and measurement. However, with the future uncertain in many of these areas, marketers need to test and experiment to determine which approach is best for them in particular use cases. Shifting to a new world of experimentation Advertisers need to start by assessing their current environment to determine where they have exposure today, which methods of identification they are using, and how those channels may be impacted by the market forces outlined earlier. From there, they need to start asking themselves how they can assess identity in the future or if there is another way to approach advertising in that specific channel. There are specific areas where marketers can look to make investments in terms of experimentation: Adoption of cleanrooms to support analytics and audience targeting Investment in first-party data to overcome the issue of data deprecation Shifting to a value-based, omni-channel advertising mindset to address customers’ needs Investment in data-savvy resources to manage media insights Adoption of consistent cross-platform advertising metrics and currencies to inform better planning If you missed our recent webinar ‘How to Adjust to the New World of Advertising,’ you can listen to the full discussion here.
Hashed Email is a privacy-safe digital identifier that can further enrich and expand the functionality and utility of The Tapad Graph with access to Tapad + Experian’s universe of email data. This provides maximum coverage for targeting and measurement when combined with household and individual IDs such as Cookies, MAIDs, CTV IDs, and IP Addresses. Gain back a clearer view Recent data from DMA shows that 51% of people have held the same email address for over 10 years. Email address data by its nature is authenticated and reliable due to its longevity. When leveraging Hashed Email as an extended functionality of The Tapad Graph, we are able to link on average 5 email addresses to each individual, reaching up to 90% of households across the US. Hashed Email expands the customer view by adding new email address identifiers into The Tapad Graph that associate with traditional digital IDs and cookie-less IDs emerging in the marketplace. Reduce fragmentation; and instead of viewing the emails as multiple customers, with Hashed Email they can be viewed as one user profile. When enabled, clients who wouldn’t traditionally have access to first-party customer emails are able to associate and link privacy-safe emails to individuals and their households. Brands and retailers can use Hashed Email to extend these linkages across offline purchases associated with each email; connecting traditional digital identifiers between walled gardens, activation in programmatic media buys, and addressable TV. With the holiday season quickly approaching, access to Hashed Emails will instantly increase scale, connectivity and improve measurement when efficiency, personalization and holistic attribution are pivotal to marketing strategies. Let’s visualize how quickly the customer journey can become fragmented when email addresses that belong to the same person are not associated. Mary has 3 email addresses that she frequently uses. One for social media accounts Email ID 1, one for shopping accounts Email ID 2, and another for work Email ID 3. Mary is a brand loyalist to a top national retailer and whenever there is a new season, there is a high likelihood that she will purchase the latest seasonal decor from that store. She recently did some holiday shopping in-store where she purchased nearly the whole holiday line. Email ID 2 was used to send her a receipt. However, Mary annoyingly receives the store's ads on Facebook for holiday decor that she had already purchased. This is because the retailer has not yet identified that Email ID 1 and Email ID 2 belong to the same consumer. If the retailer were to leverage Hashed Email, they would be able to identify that both email addresses used belong to Mary. This association connects her multiple email addresses together, enables her offline purchases to sync with her online activity, and helps to determine the most accurate ROAS. Hashed Email is a cookie-free added view into consumer behavior for control over messaging and for measurement. When leveraging it’s possible to report back across all channels and devices in a universal format to know when and how conversions are taking place. Don't leave valuable data on the table Hashed Email has use cases beyond reducing wasted media impressions. Hashed Email’s full capabilities extend to campaign measurement and attribution modeling. When utilizing The Tapad Graph combined with Hashed Email, know from the first touchpoint to the last where your customers are engaging. But more importantly, know where households and the individuals inside of those households are converting across all of their digital devices, by using traditional digital IDs, cookie-less IDs, and Hashed Email to associate, measure, and correlate online and offline purchases. Imagine what your campaigns could look like this holiday season if you expanded your graph with up to 5 additional IDs per household. This impact could be a game-changer to scale this holiday season. Hashed Email is a reliable cookie-less digital identifier that expands your customer universe that connects online and offline activity while improving the customer experience and reducing wasted media spend. Enabling Hashed Email for the holiday season is not an opportunity that should be passed on. Where do you sign up, you ask? 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!
Identified in The 2021 Digital Advertising Trends Report published by Postclick, marketers are striving to improve and enhance their segmentation and targeting strategies in their digital ad campaigns. Carlos Lopez, SVP of Brand Planning at Digitas Health predicted that in 2021, the challenge will be to overcome the death of third-party cookies and still deliver a personalized advertising experience. It’s fair to say that his prediction will still be impacting marketers past 2021 with the delay of cookie deprecation. These goals along with the constantly changing digital landscape paint a challenging picture for even the most advanced marketers. Marketers can be prepared for the next era of digital marketing by finding the right mix of partners that offer privacy-safe, cookie-free solutions. Smart marketers will employ these solutions and compare these results with data from cookies. The Tapad + Experian Take The Tapad Graph enables brands, agencies, and ad tech platforms to identify and target individuals and households across their digital touchpoints. With this data, they can personalize messages across devices, measure and optimize throughout the customer journey, and then report back on conversions at the individual and household levels. Tapad, now part of Experian, leverages a machine learning algorithm that determines these connections at scale by using probabilistic models with authenticated, privacy-safe, real-time data. There are a myriad of cookieless IDs emerging in the marketplace, and it’s not likely going to be a one size fits all situation. In order to be prepared for the next era of digital marketing, marketers should diversify ID partners and be proactive with testing while the cookie is still around to benchmark against. With Switchboard, a module within The Tapad Graph, we’ve been able to develop connections between traditional digital identifiers (IP Addresses, MAIDs, CTV IDs) and the new wave of cookieless IDs (UID2.0, Panorama ID, ID5 ID) that will be utilized in the future. Here’s an example of what The Tapad Graph and Switchboard looks like at the Household level with various traditional digital identifiers and cookieless IDs. 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!