One of the latest trends in advertising for 2017 will be linking the two worlds of data – known and unknown – for the benefit of better advertising. That’ll involve connecting personal identifiable information (PII) with anonymous behavioral data, which will in turn help marketers deliver relevant messages to consumers, and will also help brands better track the performance of their advertising campaigns. Data matching of this nature helps to build so-called “omni-channel” view of a consumer.
PII data is still considered a pariah in the digital world for advertising and marketing firms, because of consumer privacy concerns. But marketers and advertisers are growing more bold in how and for what they use data to drive advertising results. The potential found in marrying PII with other data sets has become a hot topic of late, as more firms take the lead from Google and Facebook in building “identity graphs”, a tool that enables marketers to link multiple devices to the consumer who’s using them.
Depending on perspective, one might also call it “surveillance capitalism,” an act of deriving profit from oodles of data collected from Web sites, customer interactions, subscriptions, devices and other places. Last year, Google began linking PII with ad-server data it has collected through DoubleClick, one of Google’s online advertising services. Google immediately faced complaints from two consumer groups filed to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Facebook is reportedly doing the same with its own advertising solutions.
In the world of television, PII matching can help bring TV advertising into our brave new data world. “One of the challenges we’ve had in the television space is that all audiences are defined by age and gender,” said Ben Tatta, co-founder and president of analytics firm 605. “If you talk to clients, clearly that’s a proxy for their clients; they think in terms of loyal customers, high customer lifetime value, competitive conquest targets.”
He added, “Based on the work that we’ve done in the past, being able to port census-based television data to CRM data, especially in the TV space, is where the core opportunity is.”
For service providers and operators, PII data offers a means to monetize data collected by set-top boxes, customer relationship interactions, and TV Everywhere apps. “Being able to direct match a household that received an ad with purchase data is really essential,” Tatta said. “The caveat is that it obviously has to be done to protect the privacy of the consumer.”
Technologies are in place now that make possible the prospect of utilizing PII without any human ever seeing that information. “That’s where Experian and Acxiom play an important role,” Tatta said. “What’s really vital about them and the role they serve is that they’re independent safe havens that can do secure PII in a double blind matching, where all the PII is stripped away.” Both Acxiom and Experian are now building “identity graphs” for their clients.
The goal of advertising is, broadly, to drive behavior at scale – whether that be a link click, an app download, a tune-in – or a purchase. Digital technologies have the advantage of being able to close the loop on marketing campaign measurement, and that’s something that’s sorely missing from the TV space. “Being able to take audience data and shape it in a way that’s meaningful for clients is helpful,” Tatta said. “Not only does it give them the ability to speak to those and reach those customers digitally, but data also allows them to measure, on the back end, the impact of using double blind matching – ad exposure data and match that at a census level against sales data.”
For television advertising, the nexus of PII data and behavioral data can offer just the type of data-driven advertising insights that are still missing from the television. “One of the values that the MVPDs provide is that they have subscriber files and data that can be used for client matching,” Tatta said. “If you get that on a census level, you get really granular insights that you wouldn’t be able to get elsewhere.”
But there are some important risks associated with using PII data that could emerge in the coming year, as marketers begin placing more emphasis on it. “When working with known data and unknown data, it’s really important to categorize it appropriately and know when to use it,” said Kiki Burton, head of product for Audience Manager, for Adobe’s data management platform. She pointed to the now famous incident in which Target accidentally discovered that a teen-aged customer was pregnant – and unknowingly informed the father of that customer by sending coupons for baby items to the house.
There’s a spectrum of opinion at the moment on the fair use of PII. Some believe tying PII to other data sets will help drive sales. “At the foundational level, having census-based first party data and PII is critical, because ultimately, at the end of the day, it’s about driving sales for the client, and being able to measure those sales at a very discreet level,” Tatta said.
And there’s some data to suggest customers may even opt-in to PII data sharing, if it means better experiences for them. “Increasingly consumers are excited at the possibility of exchanging personal data for value, if done in a way that’s transparent and authentic,” said Jason Jercinovic, global head of marketing innovation at Havas.
But others believe that, given the abundance of anonymous behavioral data that’s collected across the Internet, PII data isn’t really necessary. “I come from the perspective that PII is not required across the board to create experiences,” said Melissa Lemberg, regional president at marketing and advertising firm Manifest. “Because there’s so much data happening, from transactional, behavioral or social perspective, I don’t think PII is absolutely required to create those deeply personalized experiences.”
What’s clear is that there’s growing interest in this space. Mobile data platform Zeotap this week raised $12.7 million for its data platform. Zeotap takes cellco subscriber data and matches that information with mobile device identifiers. The platform keeps the consumer PII private by assigning temporary anonymous IDs to that customer data that expire after some hours. Doing so gives cellcos the opportunity to leverage their first party data for monetization by offering it – stripped of its actual PII – to advertising platforms for use. And there’s a TV tie-in. For operators like AT&T – and its recent initiatives around delivering pay TV to mobile devices in full – one can easily see how traditional TV could get an advertising boost.
2017 will see more advertising and technology firms turning to these widened identity graphs in order to deliver better advertising results to their customers; and in the TV space, it’ll offer more opportunity to imbue intelligence into the last stronghold of “dumb” advertising – the television.