Dustin Raney:

So when you say partners for Acxiom, give us a little bit of a sense of the scope of that, what types of partners do you really focus on. Just lay the ground for us.

Ted Dixon:

It’s the usual suspects in ad tech, so to speak. We run the gamut from buy-side to sell-side and everybody in the middle in the LUMAscape who has an interest in consumer data, third-party data for data activation and analytics. We work with everyone from The Trade Desk, one of the largest programmatic or the largest programmatic open internet trading platforms, DSPs. We work with walled gardens. We work with streaming audio. We work with connected TV, we work in advanced TV, addressable TV. Our data’s available in marketplaces. We work on the supply-side as well, or the sell-side so to speak, with SSPs.

So we work with just about anybody who has an interest in using third-party data on behalf of buyers, clients, advertisers, agencies acting on their behalf in order to activate audiences, and measuring success in terms of delivering, if you will, delivering results against measured outcomes, whether it’s up the funnel, brand awareness, engagement middle of the funnel, or transactions at the bottom of the funnel. And our team works very closely with our iTech partners in order to make sure that we’re delighting our clients.

Dustin Raney:

Great. I think it might’ve been easier if I said who do you not work with?

Ted Dixon:

Yeah. We do, we have about 150 partners overall that we work with and it’s a great portfolio of folks and we work with a number of marketplace partners as well, like LiveRAMP and TransUnion and others in order to make our data available.

Kyle Hollaway:

So Ted, there’s been a whole lot of change in the industry, especially over the past five years, and I hate to say it listeners, but we have to talk about third-party cookies again. Again because it is very relevant to this conversation. Ted, how has that affected things that you do in your role in the company, especially as it relates to media buying and just the ID space? How do you get access to that data to address audiences?

Ted Dixon:

In some ways it’s been a distraction. Our data, our consumer data is built off of offline data, so finding a way in which to make that data available to buyers on different IDs and different spaces, we worked through a number of different third parties as well as directly with certain platforms in order to do that.

From my perspective, I saw third-party cookies begin decline more than a year ago. It wasn’t a surprise that Google decided to kick the can down the road so to speak, but I think we’d already begun to move on from third-party cookies in terms of what agency buyers were looking for, in terms of how to activate how our clients were handling the situation, whether it was on proprietary IDs or direct matches that we’ve established through our direct connectors in order to make our consumer audiences available.

Cookies and MAIDs and whatnot that are still available to be traded on are great. There still is significant reach in all channels of digital media. As far as I’m concerned, we provide the best consumer data manufactured using a methodology of bringing together multiple data sources and then finding the best possible way to distribute those audiences for the buyer to the platform they want depending on the IT space that works best for everyone.

Dustin Raney:

You mentioned there the agency buyers.

Ted Dixon:

Yeah.

Dustin Raney:

Go into that a little bit for us. Who do you work with at the agencies? What are they looking for? How do we service that?

Ted Dixon:

Yeah, that’s a good question. Being part of IPG, we are working with many of the IPG agencies and their brands on behalf of their clients. And at the end of the day, the goal is to make sure that you’re building the best audience and making the best recommendation for that particular buyer and connecting it where that buyer wants to buy it and activate that media.

As I’d mentioned, we have a team of folks here of data consultants called the data gurus who work very closely with our agency partnership team, whether it’s IPG agencies, KINESSO as an example, or with non-IPG agencies that are looking to reach certain audiences. And it’s very consultative what can be strategic from our data planning perspective but also very tactical in terms of execution. And we want to make sure that we’ve got the best segments, if you will, audiences available based on what those buyers’ needs are.

So it’s a little give and get so to speak. And as with anything, and what I think of in terms at the end of the day is performance marketing is that you got to test, you have to learn, you need to iterate, and you need to continue to refine those audiences.

Kyle Hollaway:

So Ted, with that said, what are some of the maybe key performance indicators on how you know you’re getting it right? What are things that marketers are judging data acquisition upon to say are these audiences accurate? Are they scaled? What are some things that you’re seeing them look at as far as performance goes?

Ted Dixon:

Yeah. I think the first thing is what does the marketer consider success to be and making sure that you interrogate that and understand that because the audience that you may build, especially if it’s modeled, your mileage may vary based on what that is, how deep you want to go into the model, whether you want to target the most likely people, which might not be the most desirous folks based on what their goals are.

So understanding that, how are you going to measure this? Is this going to be a brand awareness campaign where it’s really being able to fulfill, if you will, your media budget targeting these audiences within a specific period of time? Is there going to be any type of post-campaign measurement? If so, how is that going to be measured and are the results going to be shared?

Is it about engagement? Is it about views and clicks? Is it about visiting a particular destination? Is it more transaction? Is it driven more by transactions in which people need to do something? And then evaluating what those folks look like who actually take that action, and then working with the clients in order to, for all intents and purposes, find more folks like that, which can lead to building a model, which can lead to perhaps finding other third-party data because third-party data allows you to expand your reach, continue to test and iterate in order to get it better.

Kyle Hollaway:

I want to take a moment to maybe kind of pivot.

Ted Dixon:

Yeah.

Kyle Hollaway:

I have two kind of topics I’d like to get to and we can pick which one we go first. One is obviously it’s summertime. Love your shirt there.

Ted Dixon:

Thank you.

Kyle Hollaway:

Very summery.

Ted Dixon:

My wife picked it out.

Kyle Hollaway:

Tried to go with the same theme myself.

Ted Dixon:

There you go.

Kyle Hollaway:

But we’ve got Cannes.

Ted Dixon:

I like the toucans.

Kyle Hollaway:

Thank you.

Ted Dixon:

Toucans, not really sure.

Kyle Hollaway:

We have a Cannes. So you’re at Cannes.

Ted Dixon:

Yeah.

Kyle Hollaway:

And so that’s a huge event for the industry, so want to talk a little bit there, especially from a partner perspective. And then the other side is, the other big thing going on is obviously upfronts and addressability and all the upfront work there. So why don’t you first give us a little recap, your take on Cannes?

Ted Dixon:

I think it is, first of all, it’s lovely. Let’s just get that out of the way. It doesn’t suck being there, or maybe I should just say it’s such a wonderful experience.

When I think about where I want to be at certain times of the year in order to speak to folks, I think at the beginning of the year I think about CES as the starting gun, so to speak, in terms of what are we going to do this year? You’ve already done your pre-work at the end of the year in terms of business planning for 2024 or 2025. There are other, Possible and Ramp Up, which are great places to go and meet folks. But Cannes really for me is the mid-year check-in, how are we doing? The people who make decisions are all present. From my perspective, folks are engaged. If you put the pre-work in, your team puts the work in, you can go into a 30-minute meeting and really accomplish a lot with people who are empowered to make those decisions. And then getting back from Cannes after meeting with all the folks that you’ve met there, it’s taking action on what those next steps are.

We met, we had a team of four folks in direct business, so think of it as digital third-party consumer data. From our team there, we had 50-plus meetings over the course of the week, substantive meetings, networking events, dinners. It was great. And as far as the industry, it’s a who’s who and you run into people that you haven’t seen in a long time. I find it very productive. But put the work in beforehand, put the work in while you’re there, put the work in at the end of it, you’ve got decision-makers, know what you want to accomplish when you get there, and I think it’s a great conference.

Dustin Raney:

Man, I definitely want to go sometime, so thanks for making me jealous.

Ted Dixon:

I have some pictures [inaudible 00:09:32] like to see them.

Dustin Raney:

Yeah, it’s okay.

Ted Dixon:

That’s okay.

Dustin Raney:

Those decisions that are being made, just so our listeners that might not understand what’s going down there, especially in your role, are decisions being made on, like Kyle mentioned the word upfronts, are they still buying media towards the back half of the year? What decisions are happening in places like that?

Ted Dixon:

Sure. I can’t necessarily speak for the media agencies, although we were often present as part of the IPG family, if you will, when we were meeting with many of these, our ad tech partners because we all share a unique interest in making our clients successful. What I found in terms of my goals or objectives there and what they were looking for was ways in which we can further work towards packaging or making our data available on ad tech platforms for buyers. So in many cases, ad tech companies are going to marketplaces and self-servicing themselves for audiences that they want to activate. Right? Okay, great. Is that the best model to make sure that the data is there and available? Is it always on?

My father ran a rack chopper job, auto parts where he put his auto parts in all the service stations on consignment. Then it was used that was paid for. Saved a lot of time. There was an incredible efficiency there for the service companies that were working on these automobiles. It’s the same idea that if our data’s present and I can get you over the hump is why our data should be available and how our data will be activated on behalf of [inaudible 00:11:03] agency buyers and/or clients. It benefits everyone from an efficiencies perspective.

We spend a lot of time talking about supply path optimization, in particular data supply path optimization here at Acxiom with our ad tech partners and at Cannes we’re able to continue those conversations because efficiency matters, turnaround time matters, pricing matters. Making sure that the data, if you think of Acxiom data in a store shelf and a DMP, everything is at the right price, everything is labeled the same, so can it be easily found?

These are the types of things that efficiencies lead to in the law of large numbers in terms of how you’re working with many of these large ad tech companies. By law of large numbers is that scaling my business is about getting the best use of the data for the buyer and for that particular ad platform in order to perform for the client. So there a great deal of conversation about talking about supply path optimization, finding efficiencies, making sure the right audiences were there.

And I’d also be remiss not to mention that we’ve also launched Acxiom Health where there’s a great deal of interest in this new Acxiom product that is performing very well and how we can make this available for folks because there’s off-the-shelf audiences, which can be stood up in a marketplace or in a DMP, and there are also audiences that need to be distributed as custom distribution. So how can we help you in order to make sure that you’re getting the right audience and we’re getting distributed in a way that’s efficiently arriving where it needs to go. Very much operational efficiency and also listening to what people have to say, how can I do a better job.

Dustin Raney:

On that vein of the operational efficiency side, it seems though there’s counter to that, there’s this proliferation of things like retail media networks, there’s commerce networks, there’s direct connections, direct buys. How’s that impacting you? How do you see that within the ecosystem? Is it complicated things or is it business as usual?

Ted Dixon:

It’s always been complicated. At the same time though it hasn’t been… It’s always been complicated, but my job and the job of my team and the people who make audience recommendations is to make what may be complicated easy. How do we make it easy for someone to activate an audience, find the audience they need to get it to where they need to activate that audience with media? And supply path optimization and working with retail media networks, working with walled gardens, working with streaming audio, working in different ID space, that can be complicated, but it always has been. But it’s our job to figure out how to make that the most efficient in order to be able to accomplish that.

Kyle Hollaway:

Are you seeing or was always Snowflake, these kind data marketplaces when you talk about efficiency in the flow, access to data and maybe even security and data. Are you really seeing brands adopt that in their media strategy? I think about a massive advertiser having their data in Snowflake and maybe a publisher also like Disney or something having their data there. Are you starting to see that kind of take root where they’re leveraging these data marketplaces to literally transact and buy media?

Ted Dixon:

I think you’re seeing it first on the measurement side. I think that’s where in many cases I think the use of clean rooms is the first kind of we need to measure to show success. Clean rooms are certainly helping to enable that and add efficiencies there. Activation, it ain’t there yet, but it’s getting there, at least for third party. For first party or second party matching, we’re well along our way.

It’s just another way or another path, if you will, that you can send an audience for optimization or in the journey so to speak, in order for it to arrive at a destination for that audience to be activated and then that exposure data to be returned to a third party or wherever it needs to go in order for it to be measured for success. And it all needs just to happen quickly and efficiently. And as I said, it might be complex, but we need to make it simple for the buyers, for the people we’re paying in order for it to work.

Dustin Raney:

Yeah, it’s an interesting observation there and certainly plays into the announcement at Cannes from Disney around Bridge ID and which is really based on their clean room architecture, which is built off of Snowflake largely. And then looking at obviously LiveRamp purchase of Habu and really bringing that out as a collaboration platform.

That sense of the use cases that are really starting to take traction is those collaboration moments around audiences and getting those signals back where both parties feel both from a privacy perspective sense of ownership and requirement to keep it segmented out, but also just from a competitive standpoint how to protect that but still share.

Ted Dixon:

Yeah.

Kyle Hollaway:

So we mentioned direct connectors and us leveraging literally person-based data now to crosswalk with all these platforms that you mentioned earlier. And those partnerships, you guys are out there finding new partners to basically your crosswalk our entire graph with them to start building some of those pipes. Do you see brands starting to really look to adopt things like a direct connector over a traditional onboarding service or a cookie pool? Are we in testing phase? Where are we in the life cycle of brands really starting to go direct?

Ted Dixon:

I want to offer brands optionality. I don’t think they’re mutually exclusive. If you have an audience and you want to deliver that to the LUMAscape to a number of different destinations, if it’s an upper funnel play reach is what you’re looking for. An onboarder like LiveRamp just might be the right choice for you. And that’s not to say though that LiveRamp with RampID doesn’t have other ways in which they can deliver their data to a downstream platform perhaps with greater efficacy depending on what is needed to support the business case at hand.

Just as I say also is that the direct connectors that we’ve built with our partners based on a direct PII- based match is the and or the option that our clients have in order to be able to deliver data. And you may send it to LiveRamp and onboard it and send it to two or three different destinations. You may choose to send it to a retail media network that we’ve built a direct connector with for a different use case. If you’re a financial services company and it’s all about upper funnel ITA office, it’s all about upper funnel marketing and/or if you’re looking to do mid-funnel engagement, you may find onboarding it works just fine.

If you’re looking to work with bureau data and credit card offers, whether it’s presentment or re-presentment, you’re going to need to have a level of efficacy that meets all of the benchmarks that the Fair Credit, FCRA requires. And we can do that through direct connectors because we can connect with certain partners with a level of precision that we’re certain that we’re delivering that particular offer to that particular person.

I look at direct connectors as not onboarding, I just look at it as a way in which we can provide our clients with choices and helping them to decide what’s the best way to get that audience out there for their own business needs and not to limit, if you will, the decisions that they have. And I think the direct connectors that we have are wonderful in the way that you can match audiences, whether it’s at an individual or a household. And as I had mentioned, the level of efficacy that you can have on the match based on what you’re matching. Are you just matching on hashed email addresses? Are you matching on a full address, mobile numbers, whatever it may be in order to improve or, if you will, move the needle so to speak on terms of what you’re looking to do in terms of the reach around that audience? You have the way to dial it in or it out as needed.

I look at just the way that, you’d asked me about retail meeting networks or gardens in the past is I just think it’s looked for Acxiom and for our clients, I think this offers a lot of options based on what their needs are. And if you can really think about a platform that you’re building around customer acquisition as an example or new credit card acquisition, that’s what you want. You want that opportunity to be able to pick and choose where you’re going to send it and how you’re going to send it and how it’s going to get there. And then let the agency buyers and the other folks figure out what the media buy is and align those strategies around the first party data that’s being used and pick the connector that works best for you in the ID space too.

Dustin Raney:

So this morning I saw a post from LUMA Partners and it said, “Ad tech needs to consolidate.” And it was like… So you’re in the midst of it, you’ve got 150 partners plus that you’re working with here. What’s your take on that? What’s your view of the market? Do you think there’s going to be some consolidation? Do you think it’s going to continue to really go the opposite direction and explode?

Ted Dixon:

I’ve been at this for a long time. I think it’s just going to change. It’s just going through a transformation. I really do. I think there’s going to be new business opportunities that are going to present themselves. I think AI is adding a whole new look to everything. Data-driven marketing is not going to go away. Companies will come and companies will go. Companies will make business decisions based on whether or not they want to be in the business or not. I’ve been at Acxiom for a long time, Acxiom’s been around for a long time, and the way I see it is that there’s still going to be a need for consumer data. There’s still going to be a need to be able to take first-party data, put it on an ID space in which it meets the business needs for whatever the goals and objectives are for the client, for the advertiser. And that’s not going to go away. So for me, it just looks like more opportunity, quite frankly.

Kyle Hollaway:

I like to actually flip it on its head as consumers, not just as brands. I’m looking to always need new things. My clothes are going to wear out. I need new clothes, I need new shoes. There’s going to be things that I’m interested in or might not even know that I should be interested in. And that’s where marketing fits in. It’s that communication between those producers of the products or the content and the consumer. So I agree with you wholeheartedly there’s always going to be a need for someone to enable that communication value exchange.

Ted Dixon:

Yeah. I don’t think anyone minds when they get it. I can tell you though, when they go out to the mailbox and I get that mail piece that costs a buck or two for somebody to put together and it’s wrong, feel sorry for whoever spent the money on it. But there’s nothing better than when I get a well-directed advertisement, whether it’s in my inbox or it’s online, that really is thoughtful because it matters and it does drive me to whatever the next stage is in the funnel that they’re looking, we can move you along in engagement, you down along to a transaction. It matters. It still does. I still want to be delighted. I think everybody wants to be delighted. They want to feel special.

Dustin Raney:

Yeah. Awesome. So you just dropped a little nugget there a minute ago and just blew by it, but AI.

Ted Dixon:

Yeah.

Dustin Raney:

You said it’s changing everything. Talk to us about, from your perspective in your area of expertise, how do you see it transforming?

Ted Dixon:

I can share with you an interesting conversation. I have somebody who worked on our data guru team. They are concerned about is AI going to make all of the decisions about which audiences need to be built? And the way I think about it is that if AI can help us to make smarter decisions and take the time that we otherwise would spend having to comb through a taxonomy or use a search tool in order to fine-tune an audience recommendation and spend the time with the client to help them understand why this audience recommendation is the right recommendation for this campaign, the better use of that person’s time as a data expert is doing that, right?

So AI can certainly help us to be more efficient and can make better and smarter decisions. So a little bit of art and science here in terms of just operationally making us better at what we do. I’ll leave the questions about whether or not it’s going to take over Ad-serving and data-driven decisioning, but I certainly welcome AI. I am asking everybody on my team to get comfortable using it every day. Shouldn’t be scary, right? It’s something that offers a lot of promise for us in the future. I’ll leave it for all the other folks to talk about how it’s going to impact all of the decisioning that’s being made in the programmatic world or otherwise. But I can tell you from an operational perspective, excuse me, I think it’s really going to provide us with a lot of opportunity to just do a better job.

Dustin Raney:

All of that perspective on augmentation versus replacement, that it’s just a tool that could really augment and help people do more and be more efficient at that. You’re talking about the operational efficiency that you’re looking across the ecosystem and applying it very directly and [inaudible 00:24:12] job.

Ted Dixon:

How much time can I spend with you helping you to understand the value of what you’re going to buy from me?

Kyle Hollaway:

So one other topic that I feel like we have to talk about in your field and media, buying and things like that is addressable TV. We’re getting to a place where it’s literally a screen to screen, whether it’s the TV in your house or your smartphone or a laptop, or it’s just another screen. Are you starting to see budgets really shift heavy in that direction because it is engaging more than just one person in the home? It’s probably consumers are engaging in a time of peace and happiness on their couch maybe rather than at work over a small screen. Are you starting to see that as a more dominant channel?

Ted Dixon:

I am. However, I believe that attention needs to be paid to the marketing mix and to the channels that are being used in order to communicate to folks. And I think that there is going to be a great deal of work, and certainly AI can help us out here, in terms of how to optimize your media and how to optimize your data buying depending on where you’re getting the bang for your buck. I think attribution is going to live in different ways, in different forms across different channels.

Certainly in terms of streaming TV and streaming audio for that matter. Those are engaged audiences, or at least in terms of whether or not someone’s sitting down and actually watching and/or listening I think is up for debate. But certainly the audiences that are receiving that and receiving the messaging in different ways, I find it’s very impactful and it always has been a very impactful medium in order to advertise, in order to communicate to folks.

So I certainly see the shift, feel the shift. I feel that in terms of the number of compressions that you’re seeing. Overall, you see certainly a diminishment there as we switch away from programmatic so to speak, in terms of cookies and MAIDs into other channels such as advanced TV. But at the same time, I think there’s greater cache to some degree in that channel. But I think all channels still really matter. I really do.

Dustin Raney:

All right. Unfortunately, we’re running out of time. We always seem to get to this point and there’s always so many more topics that we can address. We’ve moved this year to a new kind of wrap-up question for you, throw at you here. So if we fed all the data about Ted Dixon into an LLM, AI, what are the three words it would produce to describe you?

Ted Dixon:

Interesting, curious, and hopeful.

Dustin Raney:

Hopeful. I like that. All right.

Ted Dixon:

Yeah.

Dustin Raney:

Good.

Ted Dixon:

All right.

Dustin Raney:

Well Ted, thank you so much for joining us.

Ted Dixon:

Thank you. I appreciate it.

Speaker 1:

Thanks for listening to Real Talk About Real Marketing, an Acxiom podcast. Find all our podcasts at acxiom.com/realtalk or your favorite podcast platform. Until next time.