On the heels of its recent investment in OTT data specialist Tru Optik, TransUnion has acquired people-based marketing technology provider TruSignal. Both relationships will help to enhance TransUnion’s role as an “enabler” that helps map consumer identities in a complex, multi-platform world, says the Matt Spiegel, the company’s EVP of Digital Marketing Solutions and Head of Media Vertical.
While Spiegel isn’t ready to declare the death of cookies for tracking consumers, he says in this interview with Beet.TV at this week’s LUMA Partners Digital Media East conference that they’re increasingly less relevant.
“One of the things we’re spending a lot of time on is where is new consumption happening and what’s the identity signals in that new world,” says Spiegel, who joined TransUnion last August from MediaLink. “And a lot of that has to do with certainly not only devices but IP-based content.”
TruSignal uses its custom audience-building platform to deliver predictive scoring powered by artificial intelligence, making data available and actionable in almost real time for one-to-one addressable marketing. The combination of its technologies and information will allow TransUnion’s inherent accuracy to operate at scale, according to a news release.
Spiegel sees TransUnion, the consumer credit reporting agency whose data holdings include 200 million files profiling nearly every credit-active consumer in the United States, as an enabler capable of straddling both privacy and technology.
“We are fortunate to be able to actually leverage and utilize PII in a safe, secure manner,” he says, because TransUnion is used to government regulations “and leaning into the new privacy regulations that will come. A lot of the players in the ecosystem are uncomfortable leveraging PII. They don’t have the infrastructure to do that.”
As opposed to distributing information, TransUnion helps to be a “validation source to turn a lot of unknown information into known information. Get beyond devices, get beyond a thin slice of information about consumers into a full picture.”
While the company has invested in Tru Optik and is helping it “continue to power their solutions,” TransUnion sees its data science and technology capabilities as helping marketers understand “what to show to consumers and what next best action to highlight, what offer to show, what’s the contextual as well as personal experience, how do you make that more relevant.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of LUMA Partners’ DIGITAL MEDIA EAST 2019. For more videos from the conference, please visit this page. This series is sponsored by 4INFO.
