Why does the company which has credit reports and other data on 235 million US consumers want to play in the advertising business? Because it wants to be a lynchpin.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, the director of TV solutions at Experian Marketing Services, Brad Danaher, makes a case for Experian being a fulcrum of the new TV advertising landscape.
“Experian sits right in the middle of the TV ecosystem,” Danaher says. “We provide data, linkage, and measurement to a variety of companies in the ecosystem. So, addressable TV partners, OTT, kind of cross-connector companies, as well as TV networks, programmatic platforms, and measurement providers.”
In the big outcry about nefarious uses of consumer digital data in 2018, Experian has gone relatively unassailed. That, Danaher says, is because the company is a “safe haven”. “We provide those same services for the TV ecosystem,” he says, alluding to a new TV advertising ecosystem which is now being made turn by audience data.
“The demand for data has never been greater,” Danaher says. “It used to be addressable TV was the main reason for that data, but linear TV advertising is now very much data driven. The networks as well as the MVPDs are increasingly using much more advanced techniques to identify kind of the gaps, the more interesting viewing segments that advertisers want.
“There’s a variety of data sets that we can offer. But, in addition, we act as a linkage partner for a variety of other data sets that essentially people can access through us. So, a little bit of a supermarket, so to speak, for other data sets.”
For “supermarkets”, also read “data warehouses”, perhaps. Earlier this year, Facebook said it would shut Partner Categories, through which it allowed advertisers to target ads using customer profiles bought from Experian, Acxiom, Epsilon, Oracle Data Cloud, TransUnion, WPP, Greater Data, Quantium and CCC.
That was followed by Acxiom – a data warehouse firm that sells consumer profiles to the world’s largest companies, available to advertisers and ad-tech platforms for advanced customer targeting – selling its Acxiom Marketing Solutions (AMS) division to the Interpublic Group (IPG) agency, leaving it focusing on LiveRamp.
Put simply, in the world of “supermarkets”, it is all change.
“The data marketplace has changed rapidly,” Danaher acknowledges. “Especially with the acquisition by IPG.
“We believe it makes clear the value of data, how important it is in the marketplace, that that transaction took place.
“All the more reason to kind of double down on what we’re doing. Of course our path is still the same. We’re still providing kind of that neutral third party role. And that is probably even more emphasized by that transaction. That we are going to continue to be the neutral one in the middle. And that Experian is going nowhere, and we’re rock-steady.”
He was interviewed by Beet.TV during NYC Advertising Week.