StackAdapt said it made a deal with Experian to integrate the data and analytics firm’s identity graph and syndicated audiences into the StackAdapt platform.

The collaboration is designed to boost the scale of campaigns, increase match rates for marketers and improve outcomes.

“This collaboration aligns with our commitment to providing future-proof marketing solutions that drive meaningful results,” StackAdapt senior VP of advertising technologies Michael Shang said. “With seamless and secure access to Experian’s identity solutions and audiences directly within the StackAdapt platform, our clients can now better reach and engage their most important audiences with precision and impact.”

The integration will allow marketers to upload and onboard their first-party data to achieve superior campaign outcomes, the companies said. 

Improving scale and match rates can benefit marketers in most industries. For political campaigns, candidates and other advertisers can leverage hashed email matches to connect with voters responsibly, reaching specific demographics with personalized messages. Hashed email matches are a way to match two parties who are using the same email address. 

Retail media networks also benefit from enhanced addressability, allowing them to gain insights and deliver highly relevant advertisements.

“Staying ahead in digital advertising demands both innovation and strategic alliances,” Experian chief business officer Chris Feo said. “Our collaboration with StackAdapt is a testament to our dedication to providing advertisers with powerful, data-driven insights. We have seen the benefit and success of brands who leverage the combination of Experian Consumer Sync Identity Graph and Consumer View audiences. Adding Experian’s data to the StackAdapt platform allows agencies and advertisers to drive exceptional precision and performance with personalized marketing across multiple channels.”

Samsung Ads said it made a deal with Experian to integrate Experian’s identity and syndicated audiences into Samsung’s demand-side platform.

The combination of Samsung’s data and scale with Experian’s insightswill maximize the reach, effectiveness and efficiency of ad campaigns, the companies said.

“Navigating the dynamic landscape of digital advertising requires innovative solutions and strategic collaborations. This partnership with Samsung Ads exemplifies our commitment to empowering advertisers with data-driven insights that reach and resonate with audiences," said Chris Feo, SVP of Sales and Partnerships for Marketing Services at Experian. "With Experian Marketing Data directly accessible within the Samsung DSP, advertisers are equipped to orchestrate campaigns with unprecedented precision and impact, marking a significant stride in personalized advertising."

The Samsung DSP enables brands to take advantage of data-driven targeting, contextual targeting and addressable TV across screens.

“The new partnership between Experian and Samsung Ads is an exciting development for advertisers as they look to maximize the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns. With hands-on access to Experian’s identity solution and audiences directly within our platform, Samsung DSP, advertisers can now better address their most important audiences on the screens they use most,” said Alex Boras, Platform Lead at Samsung DSP.

Samsung Ads said working with Experian data in its DSP offers ease of use, a rich data set based on 128 million households and 750 million hashed emails, 5,000 data attributes and 2,400 ready-to-use audience on integrated platforms.

The benefits for brands include enhanced audience targeting, ad spend optimization, improved attribution and brand safety.

Truthset said that Experian, a leading provider of marketing information, has joined Truthset’s Data Collective.

The Data Collective was launched in 2022 with 20 members. It was established to provide an independent platform for companies to share and benchmark the accuracy of their marketing data. 

As a member, Experian can evaluate its marketing data against industry standards, enhancing the accuracy of the information it provides to clients.

"Experian already has a reputation for delivering trusted marketing data and insights, and by joining the Data Collective, they only reaffirm their commitment to quality,” said Scott McKinley, CEO of Truthset. "We are thrilled to welcome them to the Data Collective and to work together to advance the marketing industry’s standards for data accuracy.” 

Founding members of the Data Collective include AlescoData, Alliant, Ameribase Digital, Anteriad, Aristotle, Audience Acuity, Bridge, Data Axle, Epsilon, Fluent, LB Digital, Speedeon, Statara, Stirista, V12, Ventive, Verisk and Webbula.

“At Experian, we are dedicated to helping our clients make better marketing decisions through highly accurate data," said Aimee Irwin, senior VP, strategy for Experian’s arketing Services unit. “Joining Truthset's Data Collective is a natural fit, as we share their commitment to data accuracy and transparency. We look forward to working with Truthset and our fellow Data Collective members to drive industry-wide improvements in data quality."

Truthset was founded in 2019 by industry veterans from Nielsen, Salesforce, LiveRamp, and Procter & Gamble. Truthset is funded by venture investors.

Vizio said it is working with Experian’s Consumer Sync identity resolution platform to enhance the targeting, measurement, analytics and attribution of cross-device ad campaigns running on Vizio’s Household Connect.

Household Connect enables advertisers to extend TV campaigns to additional devices within Vizio households. Working with Experian will help Vizio clients with enhanced insights into the incremental reach of frequency of campaign across linear and connected TV, including Vizio’s WatchFree Plus free ad supported streaming television channels and Vizio home screen promotions.

Vizio continues to work with data from TransUnion and Yahoo, as well as Vizio’s Inscape data unit, which pulls viewing data from 22 million smart TVs that have opted in.

“In addition to building out our in-house ad tech team and proprietary ad tech solutions, another big focus for us right now is expanding our ecosystem of best-in-class data partners,” said Travis Hockersmith, group VP of Vizio’s Platform Plus business. “This helps marketers to optimize and better understand the full-funnel impact of campaigns.” 

With the television business putting a premium on being able to identify subscribers and target viewers, Experian, best known as the consumer credit reporting company, is benefiting as demand for its data grows.

Media buyers and TV networks have long used Experian data to figure out which shows had high concentrations of the consumers likely to buy a particular product.

Now, with more video going digital and targeting techniques improving, the industry is working to send the exact right ad to the right viewers at the right time. That has advertisers looking to use more data from the company’s marketing services unit in more ways.

“As the ecosystem pushes more towards identity-based marketing companies like Experian become more and more important,” Dan Aversano, senior VP of data, analytics and advanced advertising at TelevisaUnivision, said. “They sort of hold the keys to the kingdom.”

In addition to Experian, TransUnion has entered the market providing consumer data for the TV business, buying TruOptik in 2020 and Neustar in 2021.

The television business for Experian’s Marketing Services has been showing consistent double-digit growth year over year, Chris Feo, senior VP for global sales and partnerships at Experian’s marketing services unit, told B+C Multichannel News. 

“It’s growing faster than we anticipated both last year and so far in this fiscal year,” Feo said. 

As the business continues to accelerate, the company has doubled the size of its addressable-TV organization in the last six to 12 months, he said.

“As more and more companies enter the general TV space, whether you’re a publisher, an advertiser or anyone in between that’s doing measurement, insights, analytics, our data or our services will play a role in some part of that value exchange,” he said. 

In June, Comcast’s FreeWheel unit launched an audience-identity initiative aimed at connecting first-party and third-party IDs, and Experian was among the data companies supporting the new system.

“All three of our core products are enabled there,” Feo said. “You can see how our data or our services are made available. We’ll take the agnostic approach and have it in as many places in the value chain as possible.”

Making Use of Behavior Data

Feo joined Experian when it acquired Tapad for $280 million in 2020. With Tapad, Experian acquired the capability to make information about consumer behavior in the offline world available for use in addressable, digital-video, connected-TV and programmatic applications. That means that Feo’s TV group now works with the ad tech sector, in addition to more traditional TV companies.

“That convergence is happening in real time,” he said. “The Trade Desk wouldn’t have been in the TV category five years ago. They obviously are now.”

Media companies and advertisers come to Experian for three main things: identity resolution, matching and audience enrichment.

Identity resolution and matching are Experian’s two biggest pieces of business with the TV sector. “Very rarely will you have audience enrichment, unless you have those two fundamental pieces,” Feo said, adding audience enrichment is “definitely the fastest-growing in terms of customer adoption.”

Identity resolution means connecting a viewer or subscriber to data about their interests and purchase habits online or offline, and making it usable in a digital context, Feo said. Experian uses Living Unit IDs (LUIDs) to identify individuals pseudonymously. It has about 124 million LIUDs representing about 95% of the U.S. population, marrying that to Tapad’s digital identifiers. 

Matching means working across media, measurement and data companies to make sure buyers, sellers and marketers are all talking about the same digital consumer.

Audience enrichment is adding to what TV companies understand about their viewers and subscribers, from when they’ve bought a car to their grocery buying habits.

Feo notes that a growing number of companies are licensing Experian’s identity spine.

Every time a new streaming service starts, it needs to know about its subscribers beyond the name and address they provide when they sign up. Similarly, audience-measurement systems use Experian data to validate their counting and categorize the people they count by age, sex, gender and other characteristics central to the advertising business.

“For our part, we have found that Experian data — which we leverage in a few different ways across identity matching and some of their audience enhancement solutions ­— is quite useful from a TV viewership perspective in order to understand anonymized household viewing,” Nick Chakalos, chief strategy officer at software provider VideoAmp, said.

“It’s no secret that TV is becoming more sophisticated as addressable and data-driven linear takes a more prominent role throughout the industry. This shift aligns with VideoAmp’s mission to create and drive a more sophisticated advertising ecosystem that redefines how media is bought, sold and valued,” Chakalos said. “As an outgrowth of this evolution for the industry, capitalizing on the opportunity of advanced audiences and transacting on new currencies is crucial for both media buyers and sellers. In that regard, we benefit from the data and services Experian and others provide to help us deliver.” 

Experian has long been involved in audience measurement, including work with industry leader Nielsen. In February, Nielsen and Experian said they were expanding their relationship, with Nielsen using Experian data to enhance its Digital Ad Ratings and contribute to the development of the Nielsen One cross-media measurement effort.

Shifting Into Services

Experian wants to move from providing data to providing data services, Feo said. “You can either license our data and do the matching right yourself. Or you can come to Experian and license our matching services,” he said.

For example, if NBCUniversal wanted to include Disney’s inventory to expand audience reach for advertisers, Experian has both sets of data to make that happen, Feo said. And if NBCU wanted its consumers to be measured by VideoAmp, while not sharing their names, phone numbers or addresses, it could tap Experian to provide that matching service.

All of this data demand and manipulation has spawned a group interest in “clean rooms,” or platforms that allow companies to share user information with advertisers without violating their privacy. Feo said Experian remains agnostic and is willing to use the clean-room facilities its clients prefer. 

“We are continuing to invest in something called ‘identity as a service,’ which is making our data and our matching capabilities sit organically inside of clean-room environments so that customers can utilize them in a scalable way and the data never leaves the clean-room environment,” Feo said.

Experian’s identity-as-a-service is currently working in beta with two clean-room providers. One of them is Snowflake. Last October, when Snowflake launched its media data clouds, Experian was one of the first partners, along with Amazon Web Services, Disney Advertising Sales, Horizon Media and The Trade Desk. The other provider has not been disclosed.

The key is that data services be available and interoperable, according to TelevisaUnivision’s Aversano.

“It gets really expensive and very, very cumbersome from a time and a labor standpoint,” Aversano said. “That is especially true when everything is ad hoc or one-off. We can’t operate like that. We need large, scaled and interoperable data sets that can be used for activation in an always-on type manner.

“Whether it’s TransUnion, whether it’s Experian, there are certainly differences and competitive advantages that exist, but there’s not one clear winner,” Aversano said. “Big chunks of the ecosystem are working with Experian, but chunks are working with TransUnion. The key is interoperability. That is starting to exist in a big way. If you have an advertiser who’s using Experian as their spine, or TransUnion, we can work with both.”

Looking forward, Feo sees Experian’s role in attribution services growing as more companies look to use data to measure how well their ad campaigns move product off shelves and out of showrooms. 

Attribution is growing into a fourth business category for Experian Business Services, he said.

“In TV, it’s becoming an emerging — call it product line, or use case — where Experian’s being leveraged across the addressable and connected TV space,” Feo said. “Historically it’s been an add-on feature for when you use our data for targeting. It’s starting to emerge as a stand-alone.” ▪️

Nielsen and Experian said they expanded their collaboration to enhance Nielsen’s identity system for digital measurement of the open web.

Experian’s marketing asset will provide persistent IDs for the Nielsen Identity System, giving it more coverage and interoperability, the companies said.

Nielsen said that the move will help its measurement be consistent and comparable across screens and devices, a goal as it builds Nielsen One, its new cross-platform audience system.

Also: Nielsen Teams With Trade Desk Internationally To Improve Identity Resolution on Internet

With consumers getting more choice about how and the view content, and the new devices they can do that with, Nielsen, long the dominant measurement company, is under pressure from the media and advertising business to update its systems and methodologies. Nielsen current television measurement system has lost its accreditation from the Media Rating Council and more media companies are testing alternatives to Nielsen they can use when buying and selling advertising.

Also: The Front-Runner: How iSpot Became a Favorite To Claim Nielsen’s Measurement Crown

At the same time, Google and other digital companies are getting rid of cookies, which have been used for tracking individuals online, so new systems for identifying consumers are being developed.

“This expanded agreement with Experian immediately enriches Nielsen’s Identity System in the US, and showcases our commitment to independent measurement and marketplace interoperability,” said Mainak Mazumdar, chief data and research officer, Nielsen. "This is an important milestone as we continue to evolve our technologies and methodologies as we move toward Nielsen One, underpinning a strong digital measurement capability which helps with the vision of a true cross-platform that measures across all screens.”

Nielsen said integrating Experian marketing data assets into the Nielsen ID System will strengthen Nielsen’s ability to match person-level data to devices. That is supposed to give advertisers and publishers more confidence in Nielsen’s Digital Ad Ratings.

“Experian’s goal is to enable privacy-forward identity in the marketing ecosystem, helping brands build smarter audience strategies and powering more robust cross-platform measurement,” said Aimee Irwin, senior VP of strategy and partnerships, Experian Marketing Services. “We are excited to expand our longstanding strategic partnership with Nielsen, bringing addressability at scale through connectivity and interoperability across the ever evolving identity landscape.”  ■

Comscore, working with Experian, InfoSum and LiveRamp, said it will begin incorporating first-party data into its audience targeting product, Predictive Audiences.

Predictive Audiences enables advertisers to reach audiences based on granular behaviors centered on contextuality. The ability for advertisers to add their first-party data to the mix increases the type of behavior-based audiences they can target.

“As the cookie-free future draws closer, it's clear that advertisers need better mechanisms to leverage their 1st party data in a privacy-centric and cookie-free way," said Rachel Gantz, general manager, activation solutions, Comscore. "We're thrilled to collaborate with all the major matching and clean room leaders to enhance our Predictive Audiences solution, which is the only capability in the market that offers this first-party integration at scale for advertisers across geographies."

Also Read: Charter’s Spectrum Reach Shifts to Comscore for Local Ratings

"We are thrilled to join with Comscore to provide future-proofed, identity agnostic solutions to our clients. Through this partnership, brands, media owners and agencies will be empowered to collaborate at unprecedented speed, delivering better data-driven experiences that prioritize consumer privacy," added Lauren Wetzel, InfoSum president North America. "With uncertainty across the industry, InfoSum is excited to work with Comscore to provide privacy-first data collaboration that enables companies to seamlessly move to a first-party data world."

Predictive Audiences is a core part of Comscore's cookie-free solutions within the Comscore Activation suite, which helps advertisers reach specific demographics, and behavioral TV and OTT audiences. By combining Comscore's media consumption data assets with the industry's second-largest contextual crawler and intelligent categorization technology, Comscore is able to translate audience segments at scale into contextual signals for cookie-free targeting.

TVSquared said it is teaming up with Experian to measure the audience segments targeted by advanced TV advertising campaigns.

The combination of TVSquared’s technology and Experian’s data and identity assets will help publishers and advertisers understand who is watching and who is responding, allowing campaigns to be optimized. 

Also Read: TVSquared Launches Analytics Platform ADvantage XP

Together, the companies say they can measure reach and frequency, unique reach and outcomes for targeted TV campaigns.

“Experian is the gold standard for marketing data that advertisers want to leverage and measure against,” said Bob Ivins, chief strategy officer, TVSquared. “With Experian’s data in ADvantage and ADvantage XP, we’re empowering advertisers to put audiences at the center of their TV strategies, providing always-on measurement to identify not only the audiences reached, but also those most responsive to their campaigns. These performance insights can be leveraged to maximize targeting and activation.”

With the integration of Experian’s data, TVSquared expands its breadth of coverage, which includes smart TV, set-top box and other ad occurrence and exposure data sources. 

“We work with the largest media publishers and advertisers in the U.S. to enable and measure digital, addressable and Connected TV campaigns. Extending our capabilities to measure linear TV ad effectiveness is a natural evolution of our TV services,” said Genevieve Juillard, president of marketing services and data quality, Experian. “Our collaboration with TVSquared opens the door for us to help advertisers measure all facets of TV campaigns and reach consumers effectively.”