Media Buying Briefing: To own or not to own, that’s the question with agencies and data — Part I: Publicis/Epsilon | International Association of Digital Marketing Professionals (IADMP)

By jim cooper

The agency holding companies have chosen divergent paths over how to leverage and incorporate data, which in the last five or so years has muscled its way to the forefront of most media decisions.

Publicis and IPG landed firmly in the acquisition camp; better to buy a large data firm and have inside access to troves of third-party information on billions of consumers worldwide. Publicis did so in 2019 with its $4.4 billion purchase of Epsilon, a year after IPG acquired Acxiom for $2.3 billion.

The other holding companies tacked in differing directions: Omnicom built from within, making Omni and Annalect its data nerve centers; WPP built mPlatform out of a number of data and programmatic/trading elements within its GroupM arm, but that’s quietly faded into the background as the company focuses more on its Xaxis unit; Dentsu acquired Merkle in 2016 and has since made smaller acquisitions folded ino Merkle; finally, Havas firmly stood in the camp of buying data on an as-need basis rather than a full-on acquisition. (One has to include S4 Capital into the holding companies, if only because of Sir Martin Sorrell’s relentless ambition to stick it to the holding-company model he helped create over the last 25 years). S4 bought ConversionWorks and Datalicious in 2019 to fold into its MightyHive unit.

Forrester principal analyst Jay Pattisall thinks the own/acquire-vs-build/rent debate matters less than the accuracy and value of the data itself. “You can really look at this as water from the same mountain flowing to two different rivers,” said Pattisall. “What matters most is who’s best at filtering the water.” That said, he does acknowledge that the proprietary model could have a filtration advantage due to the fact that it’s done in-house rather than outsourced.

That’s why, in this installment on data in media agencies, I take a look at Publicis and Epsilon’s approach through the eyes of Hawkeye, the holding company’s lead CRM offering in North America and self-described “tip of the spear for those types of solutions for Publicis,” according to Zach Baze, Hawkeye’s chief intelligence officer. After Publicis bought Epsilon, it merged the data giant’s agency practice into Hawkeye, “and that shared DNA and fluency made for a super-fast integration,” explained Baze. (Other Epsilon divisions reside elsewhere in Publicis.)

To Baze’s thinking, the Epsilon acquisition came with one vital development that will give the company an edge as the data and programmatic world works toward a solution to the crumbling cookie: Core ID, a unique person-based (not cookie based) ID that he claims has the “best cross-device accuracy in the market,” and which Epsilon has been working on since the early 2000s.

“What our group has done is take all those Epsilon tools and build a service layer on top them for insight extraction purposes,” said Baze. “We can help quickly if an assistant media planner has a hunch about an audience that might be appropriate for a client. Because there’s a unique ID ascribed to each individual within those tools, all …read more

Source:: Digiday