Can the digital ad industry’s signal-loss pain be Experian’s gain?
Experian has two new identity-focused products that simplify its marketing offerings and aim to give digital marketers a more complete user ID graph.
The products combine Experian’s offline consumer data set (purchase behaviors, interests, lifestyle info) with online consumer data (media consumption habits and device usage).
Consumer Sync is for hygiene, identity resolution and data collaboration; Consumer View is for insights and activation. Both sit within Experian’s marketing services division and were built using Tapad’s technology as the foundation.
Experian acquired Tapad in late 2020.
The deal bolstered Experian’s ad tech and engineering know-how and gave the company a stronger foothold in the advertising ecosystem, said Jeremy Hlavacek, chief commercial officer at Experian.
How’s the view?
As a data broker, Experian has access to behavioral and demographic data on more than 300 million Americans across 125 million households and 2 billion devices.
Consumer View encompasses all of Experian’s services that help marketers understand audiences and consumer behavior, including audience insights and discovery, analytics and measurement and Experian’s marketplace for third-party audience data sets.
Its counterpart, Consumer Sync, combines Experian’s data with marketer data sets via cross-device ID resolution and audience matching. It also scouts potential new customers using AI and machine learning to match lookalike audiences across first-party and third-party data.
Marketers can also activate Experian’s data graph without combining it with other data sets.
The products are designed for an ecosystem in which identifiers such as third-party cookies and device IDs are being deprecated and proprietary IDs are becoming the new normal, Hlavacek said.
“Suddenly identifiers aren’t free, universal and built into your browser,” he said. “Over the past 10 years of programmatic, CMOs have come to expect targeting, performance, accuracy and precision, and you still need to deliver all that, but in a space where there might not be cookies or mobile identifiers.”
Clearing the air
Experian sees an opportunity to fill the gaps left open. And with the launch of its new services, it hopes to dispel confusion over what the company offers and how its products function.
“We’ve gotten feedback in the past that it wasn’t totally clear how some of the Experian services and products worked,” Hlavacek said, “so we’ve simplified the story.”
The new offering is more straightforward, he said. One product for identifying a target audience, what devices they’re using and what media they’re consuming, and another that layers on additional behavioral and demographic data to help marketers fine-tune their messaging to fit that target audience.
Consumer Sync is also ID-agnostic, said Experian CMO Rachael Donnelly, meaning it can be used alongside any proprietary ID, either through a direct integration or via data clean rooms.
Giving marketers this kind of flexibility around ID graph integration is the only way to build a more resilient digital ad industry, said Genevieve Juillard, president of Experian’s marketing services group.
“The ecosystem shouldn’t be reliant on one single type of identifier – that’s what’s gotten us into this pickle to begin with,” she said. “Our stance is to help our clients use multiple identifiers, so their success won’t be at the whim of sudden decisions or single pieces of data.”
