Data marketing company eXelate on Tuesday launched the eXelate Customer Data Cloud, unifying its data exchange, data-management platform (DMP) and analytics.
It also launched a streaming audio DMP in partnership with digital audio measurement company Triton Digital and is partnering with interactive video ad platform Innovid and set-top box provider Roku to create a smart TV ad-serving application.
A Deterministic Cloud
The Customer Data Cloud links eXelate’s data exchange and DMP and combines the two with analytics. It’s powered by a unified customer ID across mobile, desktop, digital audio and smart TVs, said CEO Mark Zagorski.
“Once we completed the project around the unified customer profile, we needed to stitch together all our products so that the ID could be used across [the] data marketplace where someone might want to target, [the] DMP where someone may want to use it for modeling [and] within the analytics suite,” he explained.
Other onboarding tech providers like Acxiom’s LiveRamp do offline-to-online matching, but eXelate wanted to go beyond targeting digital impressions, Zagorski said.
“We wanted to also do measurement and figure out where consumers were across devices,” he said, adding eXelate hopes to improve operational efficiency for current customers such that a marketer using eXelate to pull in their first-party data can more easily access the data marketplace or activate across eXelate’s base of 125 media partners.
Zagorski claimed data quality is the Cloud’s differentiator, citing a demographic measurement deal with Nielsen OCR to ensure “high scores across panels of real people.” He also said eXelate has scale – access to 5 billion monthly unique devices/users with 23 million signals processed per minute.
“Scale breeds accuracy,” Zagorski said. “The more data you can pull into that cloud, the more times you can look for anomalies between data sets.”
The Changing Audio Audience
This is especially important for streaming music providers, which is why eXelate partnered with Triton Digital – used by both Pandora and Spotify – to launch a streaming audio DMP.
Because consumers of audio content tend to listen on mobile devices or create their own playlists, it’s much harder for streaming music providers to get a unified view of the listener. EXelate claims its behavioral, demographic and purchase-based datasets as well as its DMP will extend Triton’s listener profiles.
Triton and eXelate think these tools will change ad buying around audio content, moving away from the day part or genre-based buy to audience-based buying. This is a necessity because of the changing way people consume audio content.
While a traditional radio buyer might purchase around “country western stations,” a consumer’s playlist might include pop, heavy metal and news. Thus targeting at the individual level is more important.
Video Fragmentation
Finally, eXelate, Innovid and Roku are jointly launching a smart TV ad-serving tool.
How it would work: If a consumer searches for auto information on a car-listing site via mobile, eXelate would sync mobile site-level data with data from Roku. When that same consumer streams a video through Roku, eXelate could dynamically alter the ad creative through Innovid based on the consumer’s presence on the car-listing site.
EXelate can match anonymous IDs from recent mobile browsing behavior with set-top box IDs and then modify the ad shown, Zagorski said.
“Our goal,” he added, “was to use that consumer ID to create a non-web experience that’s targeted, where there haven’t been a lot of programmatic inroads in audio and smart TV apps.”
