As more and more brands gather first-party data, it’s created the market condition that Acxiom CEO Chad Engelgau described as the chance for everyone to be an ad network. “Uber is an advertising network. Premium streaming services are now driving to becoming ad-funded,” he said.

Engelgau, a longtime Acxiom veteran who took over as CEO in early 2020, caught up with Digiday to talk about what’s brought about the rise of retail media networks, how Acxiom will harness the information consumers in the metaverse generate, and the need for marketers to focus on connecting their internal data to be more effective.

The following conversation has been edited for space and clarity.

Explain the role Acxiom has in growth among retail media networks.

Because retail media networks are built off of shoppers in market to spend their money, there is a methodology around audience delivery that can be built through Acxiom and others, where with confidence we can say we want this audience segment, whether it’s specific individuals or groups or types of people, that can be delivered by that network.

That network has confidence in sharing the exposure data back in a clean room or a closed loop measurement solution with providers, whether they’re social media networks, mobile networks, or others who don’t want their measurement data commingled. Brands want to be able to give their conversion data to a trusted partner, to develop their audiences — they don’t want to have to hand over their exposure data to some other third party to get the measurement report back. So this synergistic ecosystem really creates this infrastructure for direct marketing best practices, where there’s a high level of confidence that the results are going to be clearly understood.

How soon will RMNs start to attract categories outside CPG as the data gets more exact?

Many CMOs I talk to want to optimize media spend. They say, “It would be really great if I can understand all of this brand exposure that I have. And how that brand exposure is actually tying into my performance media. And how many times am I really reaching people above the line and below the line? And what is that really doing?” Because there’s a lot of spend on both those areas, and they’re not really tied together. It will be easier because you’re going to be able to do both brand and performance marketing on the same platforms, and you’re going to be able to get really confident in who you’re reaching and how often they’re being exposed.

The challenge is this vision that there was such a thing as multi-touch …read more

Source:: Digiday

Author: Aaron