ADOTAS – Data management and marketing company eXelate has integrated its data into audience insights provider Turn‘s audience platform, the two companies jointly announced today. With Turn boasting nearly 700 million anonymous user profiles on hand and over 30 billion ad-targeting decisions made per day, and with eXelate claiming to handle data pertaining to 350 million users across 1,000 audience segments, the integration aims to increase the scale available to marketers working with them as well as the accuracy with which users are shown online ads, and to provide a more centralized location for data and media management. A statement issued by eXelate today went so far as to say bringing its data into Turn’s platform provides “the highest audience overlap” on the market — the greatest combination of unique data and reach.

The two companies had already been working together “for a while,” eXelate CRO Damian Garbaccio explained in a conversation last week, but as he put it, “Growth has hockey-sticked over the last couple months.” Results of the partnership (“a lot of it is server to server,” he explained of that growth) suggested the two companies bring their products and services a little closer together for the sake of efficiency and precision.

“They’re a leader,” Garbaccio says of Turn. “They represent a bunch of brands that are doing a ton of interesting things with data.” He explained that because of the real-time capacities of the Turn platform, that company’s technology can pull in data from eXelate, then action that data with exceptional efficiency, and then “immediately go and acquire more data” from eXelate’s data sets. And the integration is consistent with how Garbaccio described part of eXelate’s overall mission: “Best data plus best delivery.”

New York, NY (May 8, 2012) – Turn and eXelate, the leading data and analytics engine powering optimal digital marketing decisions, today announced that eXelate’s data is now integrated with the Turn Audience Platform to provide marketers with the ability to design and target large volumes of online audiences. The alliance will help marketers target online campaigns at scale, make better-informed marketing decisions, and centralize data and media for high performance marketing.

“Providing our clients with a clear, competitive advantage is critical to our success,” said Noah Everist, associate director, Media Investments, Compass Point. “It is imperative that we partner with technology companies that enable us to effectively compete and continually win and renew business. The eXelate and Turn integration marries the management of data with a media execution – eliminating inefficiencies.  As a result, we are able to quickly and seamlessly leverage media planning technology from Turn with eXelate’s intent data to create custom campaigns for each of our clients.”

By making over 30 billion advertising decisions daily, the Turn platform provides the real-time insights marketers need to make smarter decisions, essentially improving campaign ROI and performance. Furthermore, the Turn platform uses intelligent learning algorithms to process, in real–time, the large amounts of data that flows through eXelate’s system, enabling improved planning, more precise campaign management, and more effective results.

“eXelate’s vast data sets – analyzed and verified – achieve an unprecedented level of reach on our platform, which provides marketers with the scale needed to achieve even the most aggressive campaign goals efficiently and precisely,” said Maureen Little, vice president of business development, Turn. “It’s critical our technology enables clients to engage with their target audiences, and by incorporating eXelate’s data into our best-of-breed ecosystem will enable marketers to build custom and meaningful audience segments that perform well in their advertising campaigns.”

eXelate premium data spans 350 million users globally and provides consumer insights across the purchase funnel. With more than 1000 targetable segments in online purchase intent, household demographics and behavioral propensities, eXelate allows marketers to act upon online data in real-time. When infused with eXelate’s verified data, the Turn platform yields the highest audience overlap – more than with any other data provider – meaning that Turn marketers benefit from the most unique data with the greatest reach for their audience targeted campaigns.

“If the highest quality data is the fuel for the online advertising ecosystem, it takes a high performing engine to deliver the campaign results that marketers demand today,” said Damian Garbaccio, chief revenue officer, eXelate. “The Turn platform is an industry-leading marketing solution, and when combined with eXelate premium data, empowers marketers with unprecedented reach and control over their targeted marketing endeavors. Our partnership with Turn is another step toward helping marketers make optimal marketing decisions through online data.”

About eXelate
eXelate provides data and insight on online purchase intent, household demographics and behavioral propensities that enable digital advertisers to make optimal marketing decisions. Through the collection of directly measured online data and distribution partnerships with information leaders such as Nielsen, Nielsen Catalina, Mastercard Advisors, Bizo, and more, eXelate makes online, offline, and custom modeled data sets actionable across 350M online consumers worldwide. eXelate’s proprietary maX data™ – customized audiences built for advertisers based on first and third party data – delivers 3-5x campaign performance as compared to standard data sets. As members of the NAI, IAB, Council for Accountable Advertising, OPA and Evidon’s Open Data Partnership, eXelate is a leader in privacy compliant advertising practices.  For more information, please visit http://www.exelate.com.

About Turn
Turn delivers real-time insights that transform the way leading advertising agencies and marketers make decisions. Our cloud applications and Internet-scale architecture work together to provide a complete picture of customers, execute cross-channel campaigns, and connect with a worldwide ecosystem of more than 100 partners. Turn is headquartered in Silicon Valley and provides its platform, products and services in North America, South America, and Europe. Company revenue has more than doubled every year of Turn’s existence. For more information, visit turn.com or follow @turnplatform.

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ADOTAS – Today, offline audience data provider V12 Group and data management and marketing company eXelate announced they’d partnered to allow agencies and advertisers insights from V12′s data, which includes PYCO, a data set that sorts consumers into 16 categories based on the Myers-Briggs Indicator for personality type. According to a release issued this morning, using eXelate’s platform and V12′s audience insights, advertisers can access nine V12 categories — for example, demographic, sports and fitness, lifestyle or travel — and over 300 audience segments to deliver more specific, niche-friendly campaigns, via display or video.

According to eXelate CRO Damian Garbaccio, reached via phone yesterday, “eXelate has premium data content. We also have modeled data. In the middle are the syndicated segments.” That’s where V12 stands in this partnership, as a syndicate providing data over eXelate’s platform. “V12 has a variety of sources and segments that are available for targeting,” Garbaccio said. “eXelate is the conduit.” With this partnership, he said, advertisers can “scale… for best distribution.

“People are always looking for more interesting ways to use data,” said Garbaccio, but he said purely “interesting” data isn’t enough for his company’s needs. But v12 possesses, he said, “a massive proprietary data set. One of the things we looked at was, ‘Is there going to be enough to scale?’” In observing V12′s capacities, he said, “We’ve seen them, in the first four or five months, eclipse some of the syndicated partners.”

 
Red Bank, NJ; March 27, 2012 – V12 Group, Inc. (www.v12group.com), a leading provider for offline consumer audience data announces strategic partnership with eXelate (www.exelate.com), the leading data and analytics engine powering optimal digital marketing decisions. This partnership enables agencies and advertisers to access V12 Group’s audience-specific consumer data for online display and video targeting at scale.

“We help marketers drive digital results through audience targeting, and increase campaign response rates by 20-30%,” said Kelly Leger, VP of Digital Service, V12 Group. “Our partnership with eXelate will enable our clients to access additional V12 Group audience segments, across any media distribution channel, to further improve the performance of their online advertising campaigns.”

Advertisers working with V12 and eXelate can utilize the V12 Group’s proprietary data set, PYCO, a highly targeted personality profiling data set based on Meyers Briggs 16 distinct personality types. The PYCO profiles provide rich descriptions of the target market and deep insights into the messages that motivate prospects to act: buy, subscribe, vote, contribute, etc. The personality profiles and predictions come from PYCO’s unique intelligence algorithm model, which took seven years to perfect.

For example, an advertiser targeting water sports enthusiast utilized PYCO profiling and discovered that a ‘back to nature’ positioning was more effective than their previous ‘action-adventure’ positioning, which resulted in an 18-100% improvement in campaign performance.

“Our role is to deliver better performing media that has the power to turn browsers into buyers and buyers into brand advocates,” said Julia Casale, CMO, Casale Media. “The integration of V12 rich offline audience data with eXelate’s proprietary online audience data allows us to offer our clients scalable audiences that deliver improved campaign results and drive media performance.”

Advertisers can choose from nine distinct V12 Group audience categories including, but not limited to Demographic, Sports and Fitness, Lifestyle and Travel. Within the nine categories, advertisers can select from over 300 privacy-compliant segments to create high-level branding campaigns, and niche-focused direct response campaigns.

“As the largest, most trusted data source in digital marketing, we strive to bring high quality, scalable data sets to online marketers,” said Damian Garbaccio, CRO of eXelate. “Our alliance with V12 Group and their unique PYCO predictive personality methodology is another step toward helping marketers make optimal marketing decisions through online data. We’re thrilled that the V12 Group selected eXelate’s platform as the technology backbone for their data-driven marketing strategy, and look forward to expanding the distribution of V12 Group’s robust data suite.”

“Together, V12 Group and eXelate provide digital advertisers a precise, scalable and easy-to-use solution to target display ads against their ideal audiences,” added Kelly Leger, of the V12 Group. “We’re excited to partner with eXelate, such a forward-thinking provider of data management and insight. This alliance will not only give online marketers easy access to the wealth of data V12 Group offers, but also allow them to create the most targeted and effective audiences for their campaigns.”

 
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ABOUT V12 GROUP
At V12 Group, we turn offline consumers into targetable audiences. We map offline demographic, lifestyle and purchase data into privacy compliant data segments. With nine distinct audience categories and over 300 segments, V12Group can help you reach the most relevant audience for any consumer-focused campaign. Our unique blend of the most accurate and up-to-date data, combined with our wide reach has increased ROAS for both brand and direct response campaigns alike.
 
ABOUT EXELATE
eXelate provides data and insight on online purchase intent, household demographics and behavioral propensities that enable digital advertisers to make optimal marketing decisions. Through the collection of directly measured online data and distribution partnerships with information leaders such as Nielsen, Nielsen Catalina, Mastercard Advisors, Bizo, and more, eXelate makes online, offline, and custom modeled data sets actionable across 350M online consumers worldwide. eXelate’s proprietary maX data™ – customized audiences built for advertisers based on first and third party data – delivers 3-5X campaign performance as compared to standard data sets. As members of the NAI, IAB, trustE, Council for Accountable Advertising, OPA and Evidon’s Open Data Partnership, eXelate is a leader in privacy compliant advertising practices.  For more information, please visit http://www.exelate.com.

For more information:

Uriah Av-Ron
PR for eXelate
e: pr@exelate.com
t: (646) 755-6120

Alix Abbamonte
PR for the V12 Group
e: Alix@pacepublicrelations.com
t: (203) 613-5642

By: Judith Messina
As Seen In: Crain’s New York Business

Ali Byrd gets emails and phone calls all the time from job seekers asking whether a company’s private stock is trading on SecondMarket, an exchange that matches buyers and sellers of illiquid assets. With job offers from two or more startups, the callers want to compare the private stock prices to figure out which job offer might be worth more in the long term, explains Mr. Byrd, senior vice president and head of SecondMarket’s New York private company team.

Mr. Byrd can’t reveal such information to the callers, but he thinks their queries illustrate how a West Coast-like “culture of equity” is beginning to take root in New York City. “They understand the economics if a company were to be wildly successful,” he said. “A $100,000-a-year salary doesn’t compare to being able to make tens of millions of dollars in a successful exit [through a public stock offering or buyout].”

On a day-to-day level, of course, cash is still king in New York. Salaries for top engineers are already between $150,000 and $200,000, plus bonuses. Overall, tech salaries in New York City rose 3% last year, and bonuses increased 6% on average, to $11,000, according to research by Dice Holdings Inc., an operator of online career marketplaces for technology and engineering professionals.

But now, thanks to a five-year technology boom, some high-profile IPOs and a handful of acquisitions by the likes of Google that have enriched equity holders, employees increasingly expect ownership shares as part of their packages. “Companies now know that they have to have a competitive salary and a competitive equity package,” said Ian Ide, a partner and head of the New York technology division at search firm Winter Wyman & Co.

Historically, the lack of an equity culture here has been a knock against New York. Unlike the West Coast, where it’s easy to find engineers and salespeople whose stock options have turned them into millionaires, New York hasn’t had a lot of techies who have made a fortune in that way. That is starting to change.

“It’s not uncommon now to be in a room with people who are in the online advertising space who have been part of a successful exit,” said Gregg Grossman, president of search firm Vantage Point Associates. “[Equity] is what everybody wants.”

Like many firms, Group Commerce, a daily deal-aggregation site that plans to add 50 employees this year, gives all staffers stock options, including the receptionist who runs the front desk, to help make them team players, said CEO and founder Jonty Kelt, a former DoubleClick executive.

At search-engine-optimization firm Conductor, all employees receive option grants, and co-founder and CEO Seth Besmertnik has even made a practice of handing out his personal founder’s shares to employees.

Similarly, at companies such as SponsorHub, eXelate and appssavvy, everyone gets stock options. “It is mandatory that you have equity here,” said Chris Cunningham, co-founder and CEO of Manhattan-based appssavvy, adding that his primary motivation is giving everyone a “hand at the wheel” and a sense of motivation.

That’s even more important the farther up the ranks in a tech-company hierarchy you go. “The more-senior person I hire, the more that equity becomes a component in their compensation,” said Mark Zagorski, CEO of ad-tech company eXelate.

Even at the entry level, candidates and employees are asking sophisticated questions about timing and value. “They want to have clarity on day one,” said Robert Johnston, founder and CEO of SponsorHub and executive director of the New York Venture Capital Association. “They want to know the restrictions, the valuation of the company, the size of the next round, what the shares are worth and what happens if they get watered down.”

As much as it can be a motivator, though, equity can also be a double-edged sword. If employee expectations for liquidity don’t pan out in a few years, for instance, then workers may fly the coop, no matter how successful the company.

Giving equity means walking a fine line, cautions Conductor’s Mr. Besmertnik, who holds a meeting every year so employees have a rough idea of what the stock would be worth if the company can achieve its vision. “You don’t want to create a culture where everybody is thinking about an exit,” he said. “You want them to be thinking about building a long-term sustainable business.”

Correction: Ali Byrd is senior vice president and head of SecondMarket’s New York private company team. Conductor is a search-engine-optimization firm. Mr Byrd’s title was omitted and Conductor was mischaracterized in a previous version of this article, published March 21, 2012.

Read more: http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20120321/SMALLBIZ/120329974#ixzz1pxEjYYf8

Mark Zagorski is CEO of eXelate, a data marketing technology company.

As part of its “State of…” series of articles with industry executives, AdExchanger.com spoke with Zagorski to discuss his company, his views on the space, and the state of eXelate today.

AdExchanger: What’s the latest on the eXelate data exchange strategy?

MZ: To put it quite simply, our driver is to help marketers make better digital advertising decisions. And we’re doing that through providing unique and proprietary data at scale. The unique data by creating exclusive relationships with offline data partners, online data providers and the proprietary being to create custom modeled datasets so those advertisers can better target audiences based on their specific needs. So the exchange is more or less a means to an end for us and that end is helping advertisers and marketers drive better digital advertising decisions.

Does the exchange model exist today with eXelate?

Yes. The concept of an exchange can be taken in a lot of different ways. We still have a model in which there are buyers and sellers of data. Data, in which we ingest, segment, score and deliver – so that the exchange to which we’re connecting can absolutely exist. Where it starts to morph into something different is the concept of creating a private exchange. It’s how we connect specific buyers to specific sellers in their own proprietary relationship. And then the concept of not just connecting a buyer and seller of a constructed piece of data, but also taking that data and building something totally new out of it.

So, where an exchange or a marketplace considers the idea of someone bringing a product in and selling it directly to a buyer, we’re now moving into a world in which someone brings a product to it.

We sell it to a buyer, but we can also take that product and make something totally new out of it, then sell it to a different buyer and create greater value across the board – both for the people that brought the data to bear, as well as for the buyers themselves.

Looking at it from an industry-wide perspective, what would you say about current momentum in the real-time bidding or programmatic world?

On the real time bidding and programmatic side, they’re not one in the same, but one is a subset of the other. So the programmatic buying world is being increasingly driven by the concept of real-time bidding data or media. It’s our hypothesis as a business that programmatic buying will take over at least 50% of the display business in the next two or three years, especially if you think of it as a $14.8 billion display business in 2012. And if you believe some of the data out there, audience buying is $3 to $4 billion of that and real-time bidding is around $2 billion. I could see real-time bidding increasing to $4 to $5 billion in the next several years and the whole concept of exchange-based buying taking over the majority of display impressions out there.

How would you define programmatic buying right now? And, what are the ways people are using programmatic buying in their ad spend today?

The way people use programmatic buying as of right now is they’re separating direct-to-publisher branded buying in one bucket and programmatic buying in another – which is kind of automated through a DSP – or through an SSP, or an exchange in another bucket. So, most programmatic buying is being bucketed into audience buying or audience targeting and then the rest is, “I’m buying a branded site. I’m buying ESPN, or ‘New York Times,’ or ‘Time,’ et cetera.” Where those things will start to morph is through private exchanges, more transparency and the programmatic buying world. And that is more of the classic budgets that we’re focused on in branded buying that will move towards programmatic audience buying, but with refined sources of media.

The efficiency is in programmatic buying. You’re removing the inefficiencies of pricing and of people and replacing them with product.

Have you seen the impact yet of agency trading desks?

Absolutely. The agency trading desks (ATDs) are taking a much more prominent role in making – not only decisions for the agencies and the brands themselves – but they’re impacting how publisher media is bought all together. So again in looking at that break between branded buys on a publisher and programmatic buys, when the agency actually has the buying desk or trading desk in-house, those discussions can be held internally. Those buckets can start to be mixed. ATDs are a real force right now in how media is being bought. They’re going to continue to grow in their prominence. It’s a positive and aggressive step that the agencies are making to stake their claim in this new, programmatically-bought media world.

Who is eXelate’s target market?

If you think of who our real end consumer is, if you compare this to a retail analogy, our end consumer is the advertiser or the marketer. And sometimes that advertiser or marketer is represented by an agency and sometimes not. Our retailer, the person we work with to distribute the product, are the DSPs, the agency platforms, the SSPs and the ad networks. Those are our retail partners. We create a product. We have a distribution partner – that’s a retailer.

How does your new maX Data product represent the direction that eXelate is now taking in the market?

If we look at our strategy, we’ve got two ways we’re heading with our strategy. The first is ensuring that we have unique data from both online and offline partners. The second is building out our own proprietary data sets and ensuring that those datasets are helping advertisers and marketers better reach their target audience.

The building out of Max and the Max model data is a part of that latter strategy which is building a proprietary data product that meets the specific needs of an advertiser in real-time and making sure that data product or that model data product can morph over time and learn how it’s working and responding. It’s driven by the demands of the advertisers with the fact there are a lot of cookie cutter data sets out there right now.

Can you walk us through a use case of maX?

Sure. In the case of a maX or a modeled audience extension buy, generally, we work with the agency or the agency platform who represents a client. And let’s say in this case, we have an auto client. That auto client may have a website in which there’s a viewer locator or a “car configurer.” This is a car configuration tool that leads [the consumer] to a dealer. What we can do is take the user activity specifically from that interaction with that tool and model those users and taking potentially an audience of, let’s say, 50,000 uniques and model them out to an audience of five million uniques.

In this case, we’re able to take a seed of data, model out around that data and give an advertiser the ability to retarget an audience that is high performing around a specific activity – driving a lead to a dealer. And we can do so at scale so they can create reach.

We deliver that data through any media platform that an agency wants so we’re not tied to a media platform or a network. And we’re able to provide a response to an advertiser based on a customized data set that is specifically built in real-time for their needs.

Where does this relate to the world of DMPs? Do you guys consider yourselves a DMP in some way?

We have what we call a data marketing platform. In the classic sense of the word where somebody is going in and managing data and moving it from point A to point B, that’s not a business that we’re in. We help data owners make money from their data through our data links platform. Since we are a single-focus company – helping advertisers make digital adverting decisions through data – it’s allowed us to have an unconflicted and singular approach, which means that we work with all the major DMPs out there. If an advertiser or a publisher is using a DMP to push data out or ingest data in, we work with those platforms.

Can you be more specific on some of the verticals that you are particularly strong in?

There’s always the classic auto, travel, retail or shopping that do well for us and that we know are constantly looking to leverage data. Where we see interesting growth in targets for us are specifically in the consumer brands or CPG companies because they haven’t had a lot of opportunity to target in the past other than just using straight demographic targeting. And then the second group is telecom and finance/insurance. And again, those are areas in which modeling can start to move the needle for them. They are constantly spending money to acquire new customers. For example, people like Verizon and AT&T are constantly looking for new customers all the time. They spend money because they’re looking to drive direct response business. The traditional data segmentation and targeting just doesn’t work for them. They need a model that moves and grows as they do. And if they can find a model that works, they’re going to consistently spend money with you. So we see financial services, insurance, mobile or telecom as being targets for the modeling aspect.

There’s been a lot of talk in the marketplace about trying to make sense of unstructured data and specifically social unstructured data. Do you see that as a big opportunity out there – the unstructured data world?

Absolutely. If you think about the space where we’re playing right now, the idea of “big data” has many definitions, but one of the most prominent is unstructured, large flows of data. And if you think about what eXelate does, we ingest data that is unstructured, online, behavioral and intent data and it doesn’t have any real rhyme or reason. It’s a certain type of activity. We try to cluster that into propensities; a propensity to purchase a ticket to Paris, a propensity to go to a new car lot and look at a car. A lot of what we’re doing right now is actually a small piece of the big data puzzle, which is how we analyze online behavioral activities and cluster them into similar relationships.

Our maX Data product is again another attempt at looking at disparate data points that have no seeming relation to each other whether it be a piece of structured data like a demographic information or something totally unstructured like the visits to certain types of websites or browser types. Bringing those things together in some type of structured segment and a model like we do with maX is another look at taking on what this big data concept is and shrinking it down into something that’s very actionable.

How do you describe the difference between transparent data sales and anonymous data sales?

Think of the transparent data offering as being more or less a private exchange. It’s when the seller of the data actually knows the buyer. They know who’s providing the data set and what is comprised of that data set. Whereas the anonymously segmented data set is where we do our work in taking that unstructured data, putting it into segments even though it’s coming from multiple and different sources –and then delivering it to a buyer based on our interpretation of that segmentation. It’s two kinds of directions of the same kind of marketplace model.

Can you share some data on revenue momentum and how it’s looking there?

We won’t share exact revenue numbers, but I can say that we’ve grown at over 2x year over year, in the last two years. The number of data points that we’re collecting continues to grow – last year by about 75%. This year we’ll see the same. We’ve got more data coming into our audience data cloud, which generally means more revenue for us and for our data providers or partners.

What about the service side to the products you offer? Do you consider that an important part of the business?

We consider ourselves a data business. But at the core of everything, there’s service and both our data providers and publishers need to feel that they are not only getting the most value for their data by working with us, but also understanding where that value is coming from. And they must have a good understanding of their audience, which we can provide for them through our analytics tools and ensure them that the technical integrations that we’ve done with them are robust, while meeting certain privacy requirements. We act as their partner in this process as opposed to just looking to generate revenue off of their backs.

So even though the core part of our business is highly scalable, which is the data marketplace, there’s still a lot of education that needs to be done on both buyers and sellers sides that we’re responsible for. There’s a lot of compliance that needs to be done from the privacy perspective that we’re responsible for. And then there’s a lot of education. This isn’t a formula yet. Everyone is still learning so we’ve got to help provide that learning.

What’s your take on the current climate around online privacy and the regulatory environment, specifically?

The statement from the White House [recently] and their Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights is totally in alignment with where we’ve been from day one. The concepts of control and transparency are all things that eXelate has focused on and been ahead of the curve on. It’s been our preference manager that gave consumers total control and access over every piece of data that we have and our recognition of the “do not track” header, which we did early on in the game before it was required – and we’ve maintained key relationships with groups like NAI, Evidon, IAB and so on.

The position that the government has taken, particularly in respect to acknowledging the IAB and the DAA’s role in forming self-regulatory processes, has been solid. We’ll finally as an industry be able to get on board with it and say, “Yes. This is great. We’re together in this. We believe that consumers need to be treated with respect.” And the real solid and good guys out there, the positive players, have been doing this for a long time and the guys who haven’t need to get in line.

What milestones would you like to achieve in the next 12 to 24 months?

We’re looking at a couple of things. The first being global expansion. We’re doing some business in Europe right now and we expect to grow that substantially over the next 12 months. The second is moving into different media. A majority of our business right now is focused on online display, but there are obviously huge opportunities that we believe are in mobile, addressable television, offline data and content optimization. Those are areas that we think are a bright, great opportunity for us as well.

And then to just take advantage and grow our core business in the US by working more closely with the platforms and the RTB bidding engines so that we become part of that machine. So if you think of three tiers; it’s global expansion of our core business, continuing to expand that business into new verticals and then continuing to enhance our business here domestically by creating new products and services that allow us to take advantage of the RTB growth.

“My data is great! Really, it is! I asked it myself and it told me so.”

That is essentially what some data marketers are saying when it comes to validation of their data sets in the face of continued advertising industry skepticism. When assessing whether or not a “male is a male” or someone is truly in the market for a new car, is “trust me” really sufficient?

That is why it’s important for companies trading online data to submit their data to the scrutiny of third-party auditors to independently assess both the audience type and quality. This is critical in both building a world-class premium data organization and attracting new dollars to online audience buying from those advertisers reluctant due to their inability to have a standard reference point.

From the most basic perspective, independent, third-party panel-based analysis of online data is powerful for several reasons:

1. Two wrongs don’t make a right. Checking several data sources against each other may create a confirmation bias, especially if all sources are wrong for the same reasons. This can happen when multiple vendors have the same technique to collect data. In that case, everyone agreeing doesn’t make it right, it just makes multiple wrongs. Serial correlation in data streams is often misinterpreted as accuracy when it may really just be sources being wrong for the same reason.

2. People buy, not computers. Panels are comprised of people, while cookies represent machines. People are the ones who consume advertising, not machines. It is important to measure ourselves against real consumers. Panels provide a reality check to remove us from the proxy world of cookies.

3. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Panels are an unbiased measurement technique with a rich history in statistical methodology. In many cases, the real-world panels are accredited by the Media Rating Council, a data analysts’ seal of approval advertisers have come to trust.

4. Speak the same language. When dealing with brands, sometimes being the smartest guys in the room just isn’t enough. Many in the digital advertising space are still considered start-ups in the eyes of big advertisers, and to commit their money to a new direction (i.e. audience targeting) the imprimatur of a leading, objective third party, which carries great weight with them, can only help their confidence level.

To move more advertiser money to online data, it will take a higher level of transparency and willingness to work within the standards and nomenclature that big brands are familiar with. To try to do otherwise, we are being not just egotistical but turning off the exact buyers we hope to attract.

For the online data market, having data verified externally helps build credibility.

Read more: http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/168045/independent-data-analysis-aids-credibility.html?edition=43659#ixzz1n8FhD4vg