Data Judging Data

By Dina Hilal | Vice President, Product, BlueKai

With increased adoption of online audience targeting, more marketers and agencies are looking for ways to verify that they are paying to reach the right audiences. Historically, the advertising industry has turned to traditional panel-based independent sources to provide some measurement of confidence for audience quality. But a one-judge audience validation method may fall short.

How do we empower marketers with more information about who their message is reaching?  The answer lies in the power of collective audience judging.

Let’s first talk about why a one-judge approach is sub-optimal.

In a world where consumer interactions with brands become increasingly complex, it becomes exponentially challenging for companies to deliver a validated, comprehensive approach to audience verification. Consumers are buying offline, shopping and researching online, creating social engagements, watching TV on their computers.

All these audience data points are being collected by different data providers (Bizo, Datalogix, Lotame, Nielsen, Polk, iXi, BlueKai, etc.), which specialize in niche data offerings, from business to social.  Panel-based companies (or any one company) are limited in data scope and in their access to the larger Internet population.  Most rely on data modeling and significant extrapolation, which impacts the accuracy of the audience verification.

That is why I believe a collective approach to audience verification is the better answer. The idiom “wisdom of the crowd” is the perfect analogy.  Shifting the focus from a single point of audience validation to a collective body of industry data experts is a more efficient approach to verifying that dollars are spent reaching the right audiences.

By leveraging the collective wisdom of a wide range of data providers, marketers can get a clear profile of their campaign audience before they spend a dollar on media.

Industry denizens like Lotame CEO Andy Monfried agree that marketers need unfiltered access to data from a number of providers in order to evaluate an audience properly.

The most important point is that each type of data provider brings a different expertise to the judging table. When pulled together, they provide an unbiased verification far more valuable than traditional one-judge biased methods.

Similarly, marketers don’t have to weigh the accuracy between various validation methods (from panel-based to online actions to offline data), because it takes the blend of information to arrive at one simple answer.

Just like a medical diagnosis, marketers should seek a second (and a third and a fourth) opinion before making a final decision on their audience selection.

To put this into perspective, let’s say I am a marketer who is running a campaign targeting an audience likely to buy software.  I have built a custom audience segment that includes a variety of categories from multiple data providers and would like to know how the experts would validate this audience.

Rather than making a decision using one isolated quality metric from one provider, a collective approach to audience verification would generate the following, based on real-world feedback from a diverse group of data experts. My custom segment of software buyers are:

•  More likely to be IT professionals (according to Bizo)

•  High-income earners of $100k plus (according to Lotame)

•   In-market to buy videogames (according to BlueKai Intent)

•  Frequent purchasers of carbonated beverages (according to Datalogix)

•  Hybrid car enthusiasts (according to Polk Automotive)

Rather than answering — am I reaching the right audience? — I get the answer to what is the make-up of the audience I’m reaching?

This output is far more valuable to me as a marketer because I’m not only validating a particular audience, but learning a more comprehensive picture of my target audience for expansion and creative optimization.

This also represents a more transparent approach to audience validation; an open platform allows all data providers a voice in judging the quality of data segments.  And it wouldn’t be restricted.  It could be applied to all areas of audience targeting, including demographic, intent, search, offline and social.

Verification promises to play a more pivotal role in the way audiences are measured and analyzed by marketers and agencies looking for greater ROI on their online media buys. Nobody is the king of judges when it comes to audience qualification.  Be sure to work with a data provider that offers collective audience wisdom to the judging table, so you can make the most informed audience targeting decisions.

 As published here in