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ARTICLE

Data Transparency in a Programmatic World

June 24, 2015 — by MediaMath    

MediaMath is committed to creating an open ecosystem for digital marketers which allows them to customize their marketing stacks and drive outcomes against their unique business goals. Our consumers are marketers and advertisers, so in an effort to educate marketers about the most impactful trends, help them navigate the landscape, and share the unique perspectives of our partners, we’ve asked the CMOs and heads of marketing from partner companies to share their thoughts on their particular pocket of the industry.

Claire Alexander, Head of Marketing at AddThis, a MediaMath Silver Certified OPEN partner, shares her thoughts on the current state and future of social and first party data in the 3rd installment of our “Keep it OPEN” Series.

What do you find is the most exciting aspect of working in the ad tech space?

I love the fact that AddThis is architecting solutions to some of the more mind numbing problems I face as a marketer. This space is continually evolving; the pressure on us marketers to show ROI is definitely palpable. I’m excited to be working on products that help my peers solve for a fundamental problem: how to understand our current and potential customers in a deep and holistic way so we can make smarter decisions about the way we go to market and show real ROI on our decisions.

Based on your experience, how do you find that your role as Head of Marketing in the digital space differs from a similar position in another vertical?

The subject matter and ecosystem players are wildly different in this space than what you’ll find at a media brand, or in a different technology vertical, such as clean tech– but marketing roles across any of these industries share a focus on connecting with customers in a meaningful way, and ensuring that the products offered truly deliver against the promises in our messaging.

Another commonality is the importance of acquiring new audiences and building not just brand loyalty, but brand advocacy, and ultimately driving sales. I love that marketing can serve as the connective tissue between strategy, product, sales and retention, no matter what the vertical.

If marketers can focus on one area of their digital strategy, where should they focus?

Our clients repeatedly tell us that data is the fuel for marketing. They also recognize that demographic and pre-baked segments generate an incomplete – and sometimes wildly inaccurate — picture of target customers. Digital life is fast paced, and panel-based insights, last quarter’s purchase behavior, or segments created even 6 months ago can be woefully out of date. Brands need to have an “always on” approach when it comes to understanding their core audiences — and they need transparency into their data sources so that they can learn about their customers’ evolving interests and habits in real time. Without that learning, it’s going to be increasingly difficult to adjust and connect with the market.

AddThis audience segments are created from hundreds of real time, first party data sets. Explain the benefits of your company’s data methodology and why it is unique.

Our dataset is generated by the anonymous activity of 1.9 billion uniques traversing the network of 15 million sites which have chosen to install AddThis javascript on their pages. Our massive scale gives us unparalleled insight into the interests, intent and activity of consumers on the open web, and we update all of this data in real-time. One result of processing over 3 billion data points each day is our unique ability to equip brands with a truly current and holistic window into their target audiences.

What are some tactics you can give brand marketers and agencies on how best to use the data they see?

Every data source has its pros and its holes – and sometimes it can be really hard to validate that you’re working with a high-quality data set. As a result, my advice is to start any project by making sure that your marketing plans are built from an honest and complete view of the target customer.

Specifically, I’d ask when the insights were sourced, and actively seek out data transparency. Can you “unpack” audiences to validate that the way they’ve been packaged is consistent with your needs? We can all activate against data, but it’s tough to pinpoint how to improve campaigns when you don’t have a clear understanding of exactly how the data was sourced, and what it says about the composition and broader behaviors of those audiences.

AddThis customers love that we can help them create and deliver audiences that “work” … that we can help them supercharge the first party data sitting in CRM or DMPs – whether by appending our digital insights to their records to fill out the picture of what customers are doing outside of the brand’s domain, enabling them to better merchandize offers within their own sites, or by helping them to identify more of their audience to activate against across the web.

How is social data, specifically, best activated and in what other ways can it be diversified to deliver the most impact?

Social data can be a great source of insights for brands, but we’ve learned that social data by itself can create a false view of your audience’s true interests and their relationships to brands. Though we have built our footprint through distributing social widgets, social-specific data accounts for less than 5% of the total digital data we process. We have seen that brands have the best success when they evaluate and act on social data in the context of broader digital content engagement patterns.

Social signals are just one qualifying aspect of the way we create our audiences – it’s the richness of the social signal in context that helps to surface and drive value. All of our audiences take advantage of the fact that we combine social signals with many other dimensions to qualify a segment. It’s the difference between targeting people who have shared content about a paint color to Pinterest, versus people who have shared content about a paint color to Pinterest and then searched for that particular brand of paint and/or visited lots of paint related content across a number of sites in the AddThis network within the past 14 days.

How would you like to see the ad tech space evolve?

I think we should challenge ourselves to address the root cause of problems, not rush to a solution that ends up adding complexity to the ecosystem. There are so many players in the adtech space – but which ones are adding real incremental value? Let’s not get caught up in tech for tech’s sake, but instead keep our eye on delivering the basics that all marketers need: understanding audiences, then being able to find them in the wild, at the right time, and with the most relevant message.