The world needs another third-party data marketplace – no, seriously.
Well, at least according to Experian, that is.
This week, Experian launched its own marketplace for third-party data vendors at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
But the idea first began to germinate last June with the release of Experian Third-Party Onboarding, a data onboarding service, said Kim Gilberti, GM of Experian Marketing Services.
Marketers and ad tech have been largely down on third-party data in light of signal loss and increased privacy regulation, which have triggered more investment in first-party data products. But Experian’s launch of a third-party data onboarding solution last year turned out to be a prescient move, after Oracle – one of the two main onboarding players alongside LiveRamp) – abruptly exited the market in September.
Once Experian had onboarded data vendors and matched them to Experian’s own identity graph, Gilberti said the company decided to “make that a full-fledged marketplace where audiences from other data partners will be accessible.”
To start, Experian’s new data marketplace will include Attain, Circana, Dun & Bradstreet and Alliant.
Party’s over?
The term “third-party data marketplace” carries heavy baggage, akin to calling one’s own business an “ad network” or a “data broker.” Most vendors avoid these terms because they raise red flags.
But Experian isn’t shying away.
When asked if she’d call Experian’s new offering a third-party marketplace, Gilberti said, “I suppose that’s fair enough.”
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Anyway, third-party data isn’t dead; it’s just been driven underground.
Marketers are cautious about third-party data, which is why so many in the ad industry have seized on first-party data – because it’s seen as higher quality, said Jose Moreira, GM of advanced TV analytics at DISH Media, one of Experian’s sell-side customers which tested the new marketplace.
“Having access to additional third-party data is important for us,” Moreira added.
Third-party data marketplaces have a poor reputation because, for years, they mostly sold shoddy audiences. Now, however, there’s a greater need for reliable third-party data to support campaigns, he said.
“You can’t rely on just first-party data,” Moreira said.
Aside from the limited scale, broadcasters and advertisers need to prospect beyond their known or existing customers. Often, the point of a campaign is to reach people who are new to the brand, which inherently means using third-party data for attribution and to create lookalike audiences.
Marketplace use cases
For starters, Experian’s new third-party data marketplace is primarily a TV advertising product.
DISH Media, for example, will be able to reliably forecast audience size based on an overlap between DISH’s data and the advertiser’s data, Gilberti said, with the third-party marketplace data layered in as well.
That kind of forecasting is particular to TV ad campaigns.
“Beyond TV operators, the biggest piece of the puzzle [this year] is increasing the number of data partners that participate and having a good variety of categories that we play in,” Gilberti said.
Two of Experian’s data partners, Attain and Circana, are shopper marketing and retail purchase data vendors, so they could be applied to online retail media. Dun & Bradstreet, meanwhile, is for B2B marketing.
But another potential expansion of the Experian data marketplace could be the introduction of first-party data partners. DISH, for instance, could join the marketplace as a data seller if other brands or platforms want to use its subscriber-based data for their own attribution or analytics.
Well, no, actually.
The stigma attached to third-party data may be unfair, but first-party data owners still don’t want to be tarred by the same brush – or to package their data alongside aggregated data suppliers.
“That’s not something we do,” Moreira said. “That’s something we generally shy away from.”
