Edmunds.com is revving up its audience data strategy through an exclusive hookup with Oracle Data Cloud.
The partnership, announced Thursday, gives the car shopping info site the ability to scale its efforts around audience-based buys, said Jennifer Dodez, Edmund’s executive director of programmatic and data solutions.
“We’ve had a lot of demand for our data in the last two years, but there hasn’t been an easy way to execute on it,” Dodez said.
The Edmunds data set is pretty rich. Around 59% of all car buyers spend some time browsing the site before making a purchase, and roughly half of all Edmunds visitors end up buying a car, according to Datalogix.
“This is not just a browsing audience – it’s a highly intentioned and serious audience,” said Joe Kyriakoza, VP and GM of Oracle Data Cloud’s automotive group, where he oversees 25 people focused solely on the auto vertical. “That makes Edmunds highly valuable to us, of course, but to marketers especially.”
One of the primary reasons Edmunds is making the move – Krux was its previous data management platform – is because of distribution. In addition to the BlueKai marketplace, Edmunds data will now be available through Oracle’s network of more than 400 tech and media integrations, including demand-side platforms, DMPs and trading desks.
“We were already helping advertisers build plans around our audience, but it was just at a much smaller scale,” Dodez said. “It’s about leveraging the partnerships. Their auto team is also already working on audience programs with a lot of the same advertisers we work with, so we can bring our data to their audience plans.”
Another reason for the deal is Edmund’s remnant problem – as in, it doesn’t have one. The site has a habit of selling out its inventory, and so it needs something else to sell.
“Naturally, the next thing you’d want to do is move into the data space, to package up your audience and find those people off of Edmunds,” Dodez said. “We know how valuable our shoppers are.”
Oracle also has an existing deal with IHS Automotive (Polk), a data provider with access to troves of offline car-related information, such as vehicle registration data, sales forecasts and dealer performance data. Edmunds is planning to tap into it to help connect its audience data to actual car purchases, a capability Dodez said advertisers are starting to ask for specifically.
And as rich as the Edmunds data set is, that’s not something the publisher could do without accessing other sources of data.
“Shopping intent like what Edmunds provides is incredibly important, but it’s just one segment of the demand frontier,” Kyriakoza said. “Our strategy is to help marketers capture customer demand wherever it may be in the car-buying or ownership life cycle.”
The Edmunds data set is already available through Oracle Data Cloud in all of Google’s platforms, including DoubleClick Bid Manager. Further activations will follow.
