Sep 2, 2018

In Digital Advertising, More of the Same and a Lot More. An Interview with Neustar’s Steven Silvers


Steve Silvers, VP, Product Management, Neustar IDMP, works in the field of identity resolution. “We work with advertisers to help them know everything they can about their customers and prospects, deliver exceptional customer experiences, and measure the impact of their marketing, with our unified marketing intelligence platform,” he explained. His company is pouncing on the opportunity created by Google’s dissolution of DoubleClick IDs by partnering with the global ad management platform Flashtalking. 

How that will impact the digital advertising field is his story to tell:

Charlene Weisler: What is Flashtalking?

Steve Silvers: Flashtalking is a global platform for ad management, data activation and insights that help marketers use data to personalize advertising, analyze its effectiveness and optimize performance across channels and formats. It is powered by proprietary cookieless tracking, data unification and algorithmic attribution. 

Charlene Weisler: Describe the partnership between Flashtalking and Neustar.

Steve Silvers: In the wake of Google’s recent announcement that it will restrict and ultimately eliminate the use of DoubleClick IDs, marketers were at risk of being left without a way to measure the impact of their marketing. This partnership was established to address that gap. 

Charlene Weisler: Why do you think Google retired DoubleClick?

Steve Silvers: The sun-setting of the DoubleClick name is not a new phenomenon in the ad- and mar-tech industry. Google wants to consolidate and streamline their stack, simplifying their product offering to their clients and prospects. They are pushing the ecosystem to think of Google as an integrated offering – analytics and ads working together as one. And they are not wrong with this assumption. 

The larger change that Google has made, however, is the elimination of the USERID and PARTNERID fields in their data transfer (log) files. This is data that brands have been leveraging to match users to their third-party platform identities. As an alternative, Google will be pushing all clients to their Ads Data Hub product. This will restrict clients to Google-only identity, creating further fragmentation and detachment from a single and holistic customer view.

Charlene Weisler: Describe the void that your partnership fills.

Steve Silvers: The implications of Google’s action are significant, as this change directly impacts data linkage and alignment. Advertisers will now need to decide how much control and transparency they want from their media partnerships and whether to untether from the Google ecosystem entirely or work with other neutral measurement partners to provide an independent view across their media. Our partnership is giving marketers an alternative way to maintain a single unified view of their impression data, enabling analytics and accountability.

Charlene Weisler: Who is your competition?

Steve Silvers: Neustar's portfolio has three solution categories - Customer Intelligence, Customer Experience, and Customer Analytics.

• Customer Intelligence helps clients manage and improve their own data while providing additional intelligence to maximize their marketing, sharpen their analytics, and optimize their organizational processes. We compete with those who link offline identity management and CRM services, audience scoring and segmentation as well as channel centric services, such as call center, direct mail, and lead intelligence. 

• Customer Experience helps clients build and deliver better customer experiences at scale. Built on a framework of authoritative identity, we connect offline identity with website behavior, and addressable media engagement to build a sustainable legacy of the customer that grows and optimizes as they move along their journey. Competitors include those who offer data onboarding, data management, audience and media planning, cross-channel measurement, data science services, omnichannel remarketing, as well as customer data and identity management. 

• Customer Analytics provides insight into what is working and guidance into how to drive more effective and efficient marketing. Unified analytics enables holistic measurement and optimization across addressable and non-addressable business drivers to fuel marketing that makes a measureable difference. Competitors include those in Marketing Mix Modeling, Multi-touch Attribution, as well as both unified and channel centric measurement services like TV.

We are unique in that we have an end-to-end system of identity that enables everything from upstream segmentation and enrichment of first-party data, to onboarding and activation, to analytics. 

Charlene Weisler: What does the end of Doubleclick mean for the marketplace?

Steve Silvers: Due to the removal of the DoubleClick ID, advertisers may encounter limitations as they use independent third parties for a number of critical functions, including:
             Verification of user-level delivery, reach, and frequency
             Analysis of cross-channel and cross-device engagement
             Multi-touch attribution outside of Google’s own measurement tools
             Measurement and optimization of ad creative, beyond click-through rates or last-touch KPIs
             Attributing store visits and offline transactions to online media engagement
             Analysis of user-level data to understand customer interests, behavior, and preferences

This is why Flashtalking and Neustar created an open, integrated alternative to Google’s marketing platform. This provides a foundation for a connected ecosystem based on ad management and identity management for a better integration between the DMP, ID graph, ad serving/cookieless tracking, personalization and data unification. And it is a cross platform solution.

Charlene Weisler: What data are you using and how will it be presented?

Steve Silvers: Neustar builds identity graphs of both online pseudonymous identifiers, such as cookies, Mobile Ad IDs, publisher account IDs, set top box IDs, as well as graphs of offline identifiers, such as name, postal address, phone and email, etc. We have pioneered the use of Converged Graph techniques using all possible data points to resolve and create consumer identities and the extended associated identities of the device they used and the locations they inhabit and visit (people, places and things). We construct this identity using all the identity points that are available from all the sources commonly accessible to the market, but also from unique Neustar service exhaust data and relationships in Marketing Solutions, Risk Solutions, Security Solutions and Telecommunication Solutions. 
 


This is done while retaining user privacy and controls on mixing of PII with pseudonymous identifier data with places and devices. We also have the capability to incorporate customer data into private identity graphs which allow tailored versions of identity resolution on a per client basis.


Charlene Weisler: Where do you see digital advertising going in the next three years?

Steve Silvers: Digital advertising is only going to increase as more and more media becomes available digitally – look at the shift of linear TV to OTT and streaming, or the rise of Spotify vs. terrestrial radio, and the growth of digital out-of-home. The key trends to look for in the next three years are whether anyone can challenge the dominance of the walled gardens, the impact of GDPR and the CA legislation on the use of different data categories and rise of consent, and the development of greater tools and intelligence to help marketers measure and build accountability. In other words, more of the same. A lot more!

This article first appeared in www.Mediapost.com

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