It all started when Gap wanted to show baby clothes ads to shoppers who had already purchased similar items in stores.
Now the business of marrying different consumer data sets is a big deal, and identity solutions are the glue that helps advertisers smartly target consumers across different media channels.
But one of the technology vendors helping enable that opportunity is having to counsel TV broadcasters how to shed concerns and embrace the future of audience-based ad buying.
In this video interview for Beet.TV, LiveRamp Video GM Allison Metcalfe explains what her company is doing to help.
“You have data tied to CTV IDs, you have data tied to a Comcast ID or a different kind of PII,” Metcalfe says. “We need to break down the silos, enable those data sets to be joined together, commingled for every use case that is possible.
“We have built a product specifically to help the sell side push audiences to their platform.”
The system is two-fold:
- An offline database that is rooted in Acxiom AbiliTec, the tool owned by LiveRamp’s former parent company.
- A match network where it appends devices and mobile IDs and now CTV IDs to its graph.
Such a combination could help broadcasters sell actual audiences, not just rough demographics, to advertisers.
But, speaking with Forrester principal analyst Joanna O’Connell during “The Scope of LiveRamp TV and the Promise of Convergence“, a chat at Beet Retreat In The City, Metcalfe said she has to encourage broadcasters to do so.
“The last great divide for us is working with the sell side to get them comfortable to enable us to give that information to the buy side,” she explains, saying many distributors grumble: ‘I don’t like the idea of people being able to, in essence, query my data’.
“I understand that,” Metcalfe says. “We actually have some headway. We’ve gotten a couple of agencies that are in a beta with our product working with certain publishers and MVPDs to give them access.”
Acxiom sold its own data warehouse business, the former LiveRamp, to InterPublic Group last year and kept the LiveRamp name for its remaining services.
The duo had already been helping companies meld audience data for digital ad buying strategies. Then it began looking at TV.
After Acxiom acquired LiveRamp back in 2014, the Acxiom TV team was combined with parts of LiveRamp, including combining Acixom’s programmer and MVPD relationships
This video was produced at the Beet Retreat leadership event hosted Publicis Media in New York. The event and video series is sponsored by FreeWheel and LiveRamp. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
