Experian Marketing Services, a recognized leader in data-driven marketing and cloud-based marketing technology, today unveiled an audience management platform that will change the way the advertising industry buys and measures media.
The Audience Engine platform deterministically links and matches data across the marketing ecosystem in a unified, automated platform for targeting, execution and measurement of addressable advertising campaigns. Advertisers, agencies and publishers can use Audience Engine to build and execute addressable advertising campaigns at scale in just a few clicks.
Experian® developed the platform to automate the process of finding an advertiser’s audiences where they are today — at scale, across channels, networks and online and offline platforms. It provides users with a single, agnostic platform to create, understand and activate their addressable advertising campaigns leveraging a combination of first-, second- and third-party data sources. For TV advertisers, this includes linear, addressable and over-the-top audiences, such as connected TV.
While in beta over the last nine months, more than 70 brands have used Audience Engine to launch addressable TV campaigns. Brands across verticals including major automotive, travel, retail and consumer packaged goods have already seen success, with an average sales lift of 67 percent.
“We built Audience Engine with an open ecosystem in mind. As a result, we’ve been very successful in securing major accounts that have contributed to the impressive scale of our platform,” said Kevin Dean, president and general manager of targeting, Experian Marketing Services. “Our audience management platform allows media companies to monetize their data by making it accessible to the industry in a privacy-compliant, agnostic environment. Meanwhile, the media companies remain in control of their data and how that data is used for marketing.”
Key facts about the Audience Engine platform
- Reach: Users of the Audience Engine platform can reach 85 percent of the entire U.S. population with addressable advertising campaigns. Advertisers can reach 100 percent of the household-level addressable TV operators in the United States through Audience Engine.
- People-based audiences, not cookies: Unlike a data management platform (DMP), Experian’s audience management platform generates “people-based” audiences by deterministically connecting data from across the industry, including online and offline platforms. It does not rely on cookies. Experian has direct partnerships with over 20 of the country’s largest media providers across TV, online, mobile, email and direct mail to enable deterministic matching and distribution across more than 8 billion variables. Media partners include Facebook, Yahoo, Viant, AOL, Cablevision, AT&T and Dish Network, among others.
- Users: Audience Engine is for users on both the buy and sell sides of advertising. End users include advertisers, agencies, media publishers and DMPs.
- Flexibility for distribution: Audience Engine offers users the flexibility to distribute audiences in perfect orchestration with demand side platforms (DSPs) and DMPs including Videology, Turn, MediaMath, x+1 and Lotame.
Industry and partner quotes
“Experian has become a critical component to today’s addressable ecosystem,” said Jamie Power, managing partner, Modi Media. “In five years, we’ll look back on this platform as a significant milestone in the ease and evolution of Advanced TV Advertising. Their direct link to the MVPD infrastructure drastically improves our ability to implement Addressable campaigns in reasonable time with accurate data and measurement.”
“Experian’s Audience Engine is integral to the future of TV and advertising,” said Andre Swanston, CEO of Tru Optik, which provides media and entertainment behavioral data for Audience Engine. “Our partnership with Experian has made Tru Optik data on the consumption of streaming media content available across addressable TV, opening an entire new revenue opportunity for our company and providing media companies and agencies with the insights they need to reach consumers, who are increasingly consuming content across multiple screens.”
How Audience Engine works
Directly in the Audience Engine platform, users are able to:
- Create custom audiences by selecting from their customer files and Experian’s consumer database (the largest in the world), as well as segments from other unique, emerging data sources. Users see the quantity and scale of the target audience immediately and can export the file within minutes.
- View audience insights that illustrate who this addressable audience is in terms of geographic, demographic and lifestyle attributes. The audience insight tool can be exported immediately into a report.
- Choose the channels and portals to distribute the addressable campaign across all channels: online, mobile, email, TV and direct mail. The audience targeting file is validated seamlessly to eliminate duplicate files across audiences. Through Experian’s matching capabilities embedded within the platform, users are able to view where an advertiser’s audience is active, regardless of the channel or platform. The platform then delivers addressable audiences for advertisers and agencies to use in their campaign targeting, all in a privacy-compliant manner.
- Users can view performance in a closed-loop reporting environment that shows the impact of their addressable campaigns across offline and online sales.
“Traditionally, advertisers and media buyers think about the channel first — whether that’s targeting an audience via TV, on Facebook or an app — before they know if their audience is active in that channel. Audience Engine reverses this process,” said Dean. “The traditional approach gives advertisers ‘reach,’ but also results in a lot of wasted money, inaccurate data and irrelevant ads. With our audience-management platform, reach can be achieved with a level of unprecedented precision.”
To learn more about the Audience Engine platform, please visit Experian’s website: http://ex.pn/audienceengine.