MIAMI – When the current-day Acxiom was founded in 1969 as Demographics, “people-based marketing” was basically direct mail. Having acquired LiveRamp in 2014, Acxiom is looking to be the predominate provider of identity graphs across digital and television.
LiveRamp has long been active in the digital space, using both personally identifiable and anonymous information from device ID’s and cookies to provide a single identity graph—for people or households—across all platforms. Acxiom, meanwhile, worked with pay-TV operators to create a safe haven for matching subscriber files.
“Now we have a scenario where Acxiom and LiveRamp are, in fact one company and so we have these capabilities across all of these platforms,” Craig Berkley, VP, Television Partner Development at Acxiom, says in this interview at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2017.
MVPD’s and linear TV providers use Acxiom data to inform the placement of TV commercials “by indexing the commercial viewership against the segment that the advertiser is trying to reach,” says Berkley. Addressable campaigns are done in a similar fashion.
Lacking a linear presence, OTT providers are focused on addressable video or display ads on their interfaces, “but the process from an identity perspective and from a data provisioning perspective is pretty much the same,” Berkley says.
Acxiom’s rationale for advertisers needing a single source of identity data, providing unduplicated reach among other goals, is ease and uniformity of matching.
“Otherwise, if you’re using various and sundry companies for identity in this space and identity in this space, then oftentimes you’re not going to have an accuracy across all of those,” says Berkley.
What’s the difference between omni-channel and cross-channel? Acxiom believes that “omni-channel is what cross-channel will be when it grows up.” For a full explanation, see this blog post.
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
