There are over 140k audience segments live in the LiveRamp Data Store, over 50,000 in the Eyeota Audience Platform and over 20,000 in the Adsquare AMP. If all of these were collected direct from the consumer while they are online the average consumer would leave the internet for ever.
I have already touched on the various audience types but if they haven’t been collected from within the environment they are served, then where do they come from and how do they get there:
The role of the onboarder
“Onboarding” is a word that I hated for quite a while, but it is now being widely used in business for describing getting new customers or recruiting new talent. Where I first came across this saying however was in the data management environment.
An “Onboarding” partner will help a company convert their data into a format that can make it accessible in a different environment.
For me, that was making everything I knew about a customer available for me to use in a digital advertising environment.
The customer contact data that I had was a Name, Postal address, Telephone Number and Email. I knew that data was responsive for those contact channels but how could I contact them in a different environment when they may also be responsive to my communications.
My first attempt at this used the address data I had. Using an ad network which collected GPS location from the ads they served I was able to find a common key. We therefore matched the address data to a GPS co-ordinate and we used that to target mobile advertising in app in the evening when we assumed our target audience would be at home.
That campaign generated some amazing click rates but the whole set up process was clunky and manually run by the ad network so they refused to do it again.
We set about looking for other companies that may be able to help and built up relationships with a couple of new start ups which were just breaking into the UK at the time – Eyeota and Adsquare.
Eyeota focussed on Web advertising and Adsquare focussed on Mobile so we struck up agreements with both.
Using our location and their database of ids/cookies matched to location, we were able to match the information we knew about an individual to the required communication ID for each environment.
Over the past few years this type of process has become commonplace with companies such as LiveRamp, Neustar, LiveIntent and Zeotap creating identity graphs and matching at an individual level using email addresses and mobile numbers.
This means that any data can be “onboarded” into the relevant environment (Web, Mobile, Radio, TV, OOH) for usage but there are various matching levels which affect accuracy.
More on what to look out for with data sources and matching in the next post.
If you want to find out more or get introduced to an onboarding partner please contact us.