RampUp is LiveRamp’s annual summit that brings together 1,000+ decision-makers from brands, agencies and marketing technology companies to discuss data-driven marketing. Key themes at the forefront of the event include best practices in data strategy and quality, connectivity, ad tech consolidation, emerging technology expansion and the customer journey.
MediaMath had the pleasure of being a gold sponsor, for the second year in a row at this esteemed industry event. As part of the Data and Technology Partnerships team, I had the opportunity to chat with many of our partners over the course of the two days. Here are some snippets of the conversations I had:
David DeRobbio
Vice President, Global Partnership Development at Acxiom
Question: How has RampUp evolved from your perspective?
Answer: The attendance from an overall numbers perspective was very impressive—the first Ramp Up was a few hundred people in a small event space in the Silicon Valley. This year there were over 1,800 attendees at the Fairmont in San Francisco, with tremendous industry buzz and anticipation. Acxiom LiveRamp was also extremely excited by the diversity of the attendees – Advertising Agencies, Marketers, CRM Management, Cloud Services, DSPs, DMPs, Publishers, Manufacturers. The many different parts of the advertising business came together in force around “connectivity.” We saw much more interactivity from the attendees around the content – more creative panels, more engagement around the subject matter, attendees truly leaning in. We’ve since received some amazing feedback regarding the event space and the overall flow of the event (cocktail hours, lunches, etc). The connection time that Acxiom and LiveRamp were able to have with current and potential partners moved business forward by leaps and bounds.
Jennifer Monteverde
VP, Channel Partnerships at AddThis
Question: We hear that AddThis look-alike modeling is a great way to improve audience scale with online or offline data. Do you have any tips for clients that want to build look-alikes with their onboarded first-party data?
Answer: Sure! As you mentioned, look-alike audiences are ideal for targeting highly qualified users at scale. Here are a few tips to ensure a strong foundation for building successful look-alike models:
- The quality of your seed audience is essential to the success of your campaign. This may seem basic, but it’s crucial to thoroughly QA your offline data file before you onboard. It would be a shame to model and activate against an inaccurate or incomplete data set.
- Do your due diligence in evaluating your onboarding partner. The success of bringing offline data online, hinges on your onboarder’s deep partner network and their match rate to online UIDs. The better your match rate, the better your seed audience, the more successful your look-alike!
- And finally, evaluate your data provider before modeling. Once your first-party data is online, it’s important to make sure you are modeling against a high-quality third party data set. An ideal provider has a data footprint big enough to yield a high match rate to your onboarded data and a rich signal for scale.
Joy Stroud
VP, Business Development & Sales Strategy at Spongecell
Question: Spongecell’s programmatic creative offering leverages various signals which a client can use to achieve their campaign outcomes. What are a few of Spongecell’s best practices if a client wants to onboard their offline CRM for dynamic creation decisioning?
Answer: Campaigns often have to reduce audience granularity in order to scale on the media side. On the creative side however, you’re able to re-apply that granularity to personalize your campaign messaging. You’ll want to ensure each creative variation is running enough impressions to generate statistically relevant data of course, but your impressions will work harder for you if you can tailor your messaging based on audience attributes, past purchase behavior, etc. We also always recommend leveraging our Creative Auto-Optimization, which helps predict user behavior to serve the most relevant creative content to each audience segment and continually optimizes towards your primary campaign KPI (typically engagements, clicks or conversions).
Luke McGuinness
Head of Data Partnerships at Liveramp
Question: What are some things LiveRamp is doing to help brands work better with their data and technology partners?
Answer: We have a few initiatives that speak to this. One in particular is that we’re working more closely than ever with our data partners to help them gain access to additional distribution outlets for their data, leveraging LiveRamp’s integrations and relationships. Something we’re hearing consistently is that they struggle with making their data broadly available for use. Given that LiveRamp is the starting place for a lot of this data to make its way online, we are helping these partners deliver maximum reach for their data on MediaMath and other technology partners. For brands, this translates to greater scale of audiences available for use in marketing execution.
Christopher P. Curtis (“CPC”)
VP, Business Development, Data Products at Connexity
Question: From attending the talks and session, what do you think are the top opportunities and challenges for marketers in 2016, especially when utilizing shopper data like yours?
Answer: Connexity is a data and analytics company with deep roots in online shopping and data driven marketing, so RampUp was the perfect place for us to be. I’ll frame my answer here around two of the major themes we saw unfold in the sessions and hallways, as I see the opportunities and challenges for using shopper data like ours aligning nicely with these.
- Theme #1: Do more with your 1st party data, it’s your best data asset
- Theme #2: Interoperability and data flow is key
OPPORTUNITY
For Theme #1, the message was loud and clear in nearly every session…your 1st party data is your best data asset, so put it to use! But in addition to the tried and true ways of straight onboarding and retargeting, there was a push to also find unique ways to get more miles and more business out of it. In terms of working with Connexity shopper data, we have been working with marketers for multiple years to ingest their 1st party data to build look-a-like or shop-a-like models. We find that for retailers and brands in particular, our rich proprietary data feature space of categories, brands, products, and declared demographic data is very effective at helping to discover prospecting opportunities for new to file customers or the right audience for a specific branding initiative. We do this for dozens of retailers and brands across retail, tech, and CPG today.
CHALLENGE
For Theme #2, the data flow topic was best covered by Joe Zawadzki, CEO of MediaMath, when he said, “Interoperability is the watchword. How do you get the data to flow?” At the end of the day, marketers need to choose the right platforms to make sure data points can get connected properly. LiveRamp and MediaMath are platforms that lead in these areas. Through both of them marketers can tap into Connexity data in a number of ways. But if you choose a platform that isn’t well plugged in, it may be difficult or impossible to work with Connexity data or other shopping data sources. Overall, a lack of data flow and high match rates across platforms remains a huge issue for marketers who must deal with multiple identities for the same consumer. The experts at RampUp agreed that this interoperability is unlikely to be solved by the likes of Google or Facebook, which profit from keeping their consumer insights walled off. If the rest of the industry could take the lead in connecting the dots for marketers, it could create a strong competitive advantage.
We can’t wait to see how the RampUp 2016 themes impact the industry this year. To be honest, we are already seeing the ripples, and I am sure the waves aren’t far behind.
Click here to read the other “5 Questions” posts.