Kimberly Gilberti, a key executive in the launch of Nielsen’s Nielsen One measurement system, has joined Experian Marketing Services as chief product officer.

Gilberti joins Experian as it enhances its product offerings by using technology from Tapad, which was acquired by Experian in 2020.

“As a leader in our industry, Experian has a strong legacy of quality data that powers targeted marketing,” Gilberti said. “I was excited to join Experian because it is at the unique intersection of data, identity, and addressability in a highly-evolving ecosystem. I am excited to combine my passion for building high-performing product teams and the opportunity to create innovative solutions for marketers and marketing technology.”

Gilberti spent 23 years at Nielsen, which lost a number of senior executives at the end of last year. 

She was senior VP of product management at Nielsen, leading its national TV and advanced TV portfolio, which generated more than $1 billion in revenue.

Earlier in her career at Nielsen, Gilberti led the company’s strategy to transform how local TV is measured by integrating big data from set-top boxes and the Nielsen Portable People Meter (PPM) into the viewership data, which helped Nielsen retire its TV diaries. 

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.” ▪️

Ampersand said it reached a deal to use data from Experian to create audience segments that will enable advertisers in multiple categories to target consumers with multi-screen campaigns through its And platform.

Owned by Comcast, Charter Communications and  Cox Communications, Ampersand has access to large amounts of viewing information from 40 million households and TV ad inventory across an 85 million home footprint. It has been stepping up its technology game as the advertising business has become increasingly digital with media plans combining linear TV, addressable TV, digital video, CTV and TV Everywhere.

Last year it set up the And platform, which allows clients to buy multi-screen ad campaigns either through a managed service or, more recently, on a self-serve basis. It also started adding consumer data, first for political advertisers from L2 and then for auto marketers with Polk data from IHS Markit.  

The Experian integration is pivotal to our audience-based multi-screen TV planning and buying because Experian allows us to go beyond specific categories,” said Kalyan Lanka, VP, product, Ampersand.

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The data from Experian’s ConsumerView database -- which is separate from its credit database -- can be used to create segments based on psychographics and behavioral preferences, Lanka said, and the additional data will increase the efficiency and the effectiveness of clients’ ad campaigns.

“We can now understand with a greater degree of precision where these consumer segments are consuming content across multiple screens, which helps us improve or ability to plan and buy TV, and on the back end report insights on how campaigns performed against that audience segment, which give you further opportunities to optimize and improve campaigns,” Lanka said.

The data Ampersand is getting from Experian is not exclusive, but the segments created by combining the data with Ampersand’s viewing information are, he said.

For Experian, the advanced and connected TV markets are priority areas, said Aimee Irwin, VP of strategy, marketing services, Experian. 

Experian decided to do this deal because “Ampersand is a leader within the TV advertising ecosystem, and their technology combined with our data, can help streamline the ad-buying process and help marketers tell a consistent story and connect with consumers across digital, linear, addressable or Connected TV,” Irwin said.

Experian expects that its business with advertising and media companies is likely to grow. “We’re starting to see more and more marketers view audiences as an amalgamation of behaviors across digital devices rather than as a siloed view into channel-specific actions. And that’s our focus behind the scenes. We’re connecting hundreds of digital and offline touchpoints to build audiences that can be activated across all digital and offline campaigns,” said Irwin.

She noted that the marketing and media business continues to evolve. “Connected TV has only become a very important channel for brands and consumers within the last three years," Irwin noted. “And it’s only a matter of time before the next ‘big thing’ emerges. To that end, we’re constantly working with brands, agencies and media publishers to help them understand where people are consuming information and how to reach them with relevant messages.” 

The Experian-based audience segments will be available through the And platform to all Ampersand clients, not just those using its self-service capabilities.

About 20 advertisers and agencies are using a beta version self-serve version of the platform. 

The platform also allows marketers to upload first party data and use that as it builds cross platform campaigns.

All that data puts TV at parity with digital, said Meredith Miller, VP, marketing at Ampersand.

“This platform and this particular integration of these data sets get advertisers closer to having a simplified way of buying across all their media investments,” Miller said.

“Streaming is on the rise and it’s going to continue to grow, but the reality is linear is still the majority of TV viewing and advertisers need the ability to access the same unique and custom targeted audience segments on linear as they would on streaming or across digital,” she said.