IPG-owned data broker Acxiom and The Trade Desk announced an expansion of their long-term measurement partnership on Tuesday with True Intelligence, which helps marketers connect their digital and CTV campaigns to real-world outcomes.
Since 2021, IPG has been a closed operator for TTD’s Unified ID 2.0, which is an entity that’s authorized to use first-party data to create and encrypt UID2 identifiers.
The new product goes further by plugging into The Trade Desk’s AI-based Kokai ad platform to create a live feedback loop between the UID2 IDs targeted by TTD and results collected by Acxiom.
It matches audience impressions to online and offline sales from Acxiom’s consumer data, Sean Muzzy, Acxiom’s global president, told AdExchanger.
Advertisers are looking for “more intelligent measurement solutions that really deliver incrementality as a metric,” Muzzy said, which is what the new True Intelligence product is looking to achieve for campaigns via The Trade Desk.
Counting what counts
One way to think of the new flavor of Acxiom’s tie-up with The Trade Desk is as a reflection of other similar incrementality and AI ad products offered by walled gardens.
Amazon, for example, has a similar product with Acxiom, Muzzy said, although it’s specific to Amazon’s empire. The product was built on AWS for Amazon’s media, uses the Amazon DSP and sits within Amazon Marketing Cloud, which is the ad business’s data clean room.
With True Intelligence, advertisers can “hit the open internet, inclusive of CTV, to give the ability to measure holistically,” Muzzy said, adding that the product is built on Snowflake, which is a neutral platform.
The idea of targeting incremental new customers with an AI-based ad platform is also akin to what Google and Amazon have done with Performance Max and Performance Plus, respectively.
“When I think about how this would compare to those black-box solutions,” said Jed Dederick, CRO of The Trade Desk, “this is very much The Trade Desk’s DNA of highly measurable marketing.”
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Walled garden platforms use their own identity sets and DSPs to self-attribute and optimize campaigns, which is a nontransparent practice even by walled garden standards. Advertisers only get reported results, and the IDs aren’t available.
With TTD and Acxiom, advertisers can access log files and build on top of their own first-party data set or CRM base.
What the walled gardens get right, though, is that advertisers now expect their campaigns to have a strong feedback loop between the ad-buying system and the attribution identity data set.
“If you actually are feeding it back,” Dederick said, “then your marketing spend becomes investment.”
