Kyle Hollaway:
But Linda, as the leader of our Data Guru team and being the Data Guru, you certainly have a huge amount of experience in the data space. And in particular, third party data. Why don’t you give us a quick snapshot of kind of your background, how you’ve landed in this role, and what your perspectives are?

Linda Harrison:
Well, great to be here today. I answered a newspaper ad. That kind of shows my age… A newspaper ad that said I have two brains, so I like to do left brain and right brain things. I like the creative process and I like the analytical side on the other side of the house. I started out doing database marketing for financial services. We did direct mail, email to a certain extent.

Linda Harrison:
And we’ve tried to understand what made that financial services company different from a normative benchmark, and then help them really monetize on that. Find the right product for the right person. Sound familiar? Well, that’s what I’m still doing today, right?

Linda Harrison:
To find in the digital world, I also work with the email world and with indirect clients to help find the right person for the right product. It all kind of runs together throughout my life, and I’m excited to be here to talk about how third party cookie changes… Not the end. Please don’t say the end, because there’s always something new and exciting out there. It just changes how we get from point A to point B.

Dustin Raney:
Wow. Great way to put it. You did say third party cookies, not third party data. Linda, what are your top concerns about third party cookie deprecation and kind of breaking that connection or the ability to get the right product to the right person? What are you hearing from clients around that?

Linda Harrison:
Well, they’re really worried about what their scale is going to be, what their accuracy is going to be. Is it even possible? They’re nervous. They’re concerned that now all they have is first party or native ad targeting.

Linda Harrison:
And I’m quick to tell them that’s not the case, that there are solutions in place and we should be doing testing. Do a ramp ID test, do a UID2 test, all those types of things, just to see where you stand in the marketplace and where you’re going to be going next. That’s what I say. What do you guys tell people?

Kyle Hollaway:
Yeah.

Dustin Raney:
I think one of the things that we’re telling people is that there is this kind of shift from a centralized model of the way that’s going to work. With cookies going away, cookie syncs kind of acted as that central onboarding function. So when you take that away, it shifts more to a decentralized method where direct identifiers or PII may be transcoded or deidentified.

Dustin Raney:
It starts to become an important asset. That’s where we talk about data collection. So if a UID is nothing but a transcoded form of an email, then I want to collect more emails. So what am I doing to basically ensure that I’m offering up an experience or getting people more chances to make themselves known? How am I incenting customers to offer more about themselves so that I can continue to speak to them when I might not have a cookie to use to do that going forward? Right?

Linda Harrison:
Right. But as a third party data provider, I try and encourage Acxiom to get all that information so that we can make all the matches out in the marketplace today. That’s our job here, is to build that instead of looking at it from a brand lens. Think of it from an overall Acxiom lens. We’re going to gather every piece of data, sort it all out… I would say, “And let God sort them out,” but we’re going to let the DSP/DMP ad exchange. Everybody else sort it out, and try and find the best matches that way.

Kyle Hollaway:
Yeah. And I think because of some of the changes and the fact that even in the third party ecosystem, the reality is it was a very complex ecosystem that was rife with its own challenges. And so really it’s not a matter of something just going away. It’s a matter of just transforming how we behave and how we go about accomplishing the same goal.

Kyle Hollaway:
And in many cases, I think there’s opportunity for it to get much better because we are going to be based off of more deterministic data on the back end, more consented data on the front end, and being able to marry those two together.

Kyle Hollaway:
And I think it is going to take a combination of, A, what the brand is doing in their first party context, because they have that real life touch with that consumer. They’re able to capture those pieces of information with that consent and all the privacy components around that, marrying it up to then what the Acxioms are able to do with that third party data.

Kyle Hollaway:
That’s being associated again in an accurate and privacy-compliant fashion, such that now the brand’s able to extend through that and actually have more transparency, have more fidelity… And ultimately through a network of capabilities, have equal or even greater reach with maybe even a reduction in some of the noise that we got from these large, honestly somewhat inaccurate cookie syncs that were happening in the background where it was really just kind of a pool of information that was just kind of being swished around.

Kyle Hollaway:
And somebody said, “Hey, that’s the way it should go.” And you didn’t have any choice but to agree with that. And so now I think there’s a lot more dials and kind of concrete mechanisms by which brands and companies can begin to continue that communication with the consumer, but in a more transparent and more accurate fashion.

Linda Harrison:
I really see it bringing accuracy to my world. Instead of having every audience is a hundred percent male and a hundred percent female at the same time, maybe we could pick one and be right about it.

Kyle Hollaway:
That’s a great effort there. And I think that will transform then how marketers kind of view the world and the aspect that through all of this, despite the reach concerns and the angst that is generated, I think on the flip side is it’s going to bring more accurate advertising, that brands can be more confident in what they’re doing.

Kyle Hollaway:
And we’ve seen even through the P&Gs of the world and others where they’ve really changed their strategies and have not seen a drop off in performance of that effort when they’ve gone to a more targeted effort.

Dustin Raney:
Yeah. Linda, one of the things you talked about earlier is Acxiom plays a specific role outside of what the brand’s doing on their own. And I think this is an area where I think it is like this intersection. It’s like a true intersection of how data and identity kind of intersect. That’s like third party data, it’s built off of a consent-based identity spine, right?

Dustin Raney:
The ability to augment those matches from one client’s first party data to another. We hear about clean rooms all the time, but the concern is scale. It’s always scale. It’s like if cookies… I’m never going to reach the scale that cookies going to bring, and I’m being told I can put my data into a clean room and make a direct connection. I want to get your thoughts on how we leverage our data to maybe help augment some of those matches.

Linda Harrison:
Yeah. So you can understand from a brand perspective who is in market for a product, or has an affinity for the brand or for a competitor brand. We have predictive data that is already tied to individuals in the known world that we’re just bringing into the online world to add to their target audience. So we play well with others is how I talk about it. That you’ve got the people that you know, and I’ve got the people that you don’t know that you ought to know that are going to bring some additional sales.

Dustin Raney:
Yeah. Great point. So lookalike audiences, a very effective way to go to market.

Linda Harrison:
Right.

Dustin Raney:
So I take my best customers, match that against the entire US population, really leverage that high-value propensity data to really target those customers that are most like my best. I think that’s definitely something that a lot of brands fear, that they might be losing that. And that’s not so much the case. There’s new ways around just pure cookie-based matching to allow you to still reach those high value customers.

Linda Harrison:
Right. It may not just be your best customers. It may be your recently lost customers. Why did they leave? How do we find people to kind of fill that bucket? And it could be for new products, ideas that you haven’t had yet. We often have to come up with segmentations or audience recommendations for a brand new product that they couldn’t build a lookalike, because they haven’t sold any yet.

Kyle Hollaway:
In your title it says “director of partner accounts.” So how does partners come into play in this aspect of building out these audiences? And like you were saying, cases where brands even have something to look alike from. Is partner data integrated into that, and how are you guys approaching that?

Linda Harrison:
Yeah. We partner with lots of companies. Acxiom can’t own everything, so we have partners that want to be known. We proudly display their name like MRI or Ipsos, a new data marketplace with Equifax and Polk, et cetera. And then we have partners that don’t really want their name included, and we Acxiom brand-name it.

Linda Harrison:
So we’ve got lots of partnerships out there, and some of these partners are so well-known in the marketplace like Dun & Bradstreet. They’re kind of the 800 pound gorilla in the room, that if their name is included in the audience name, it’s going to help sell it. And they’re going to understand the quality and the value by having that name included, just like with Equifax, Polk, TransUnion, et cetera.

Kyle Hollaway:
So if you could just for… Especially for our listeners and such, just kind of describe then the role of the Data Guru team, how you guys then facilitate brands gathering these audiences together and then executing the inset.

Linda Harrison:
Okay. I came up with a great analogy. Acxiom is a really good grocery store. We have lots of products on the shelf. What we are is a terrible restaurant. So you need a personal shopper or a personal chef to go through and bring together some of the basics, which is Infobase. That might be what you consider bread, butter, eggs, milk, et cetera.

Linda Harrison:
And then some specialty items, maybe the caviar of the world, maybe some pre-mixed items, your Stouffer’s, Lean Cuisine already in a bag and just pop it in the microwave. And oftentimes we’re creating that concoction across all of the different options so that we really come to you with some creative ideas on how to solve the problem.

Linda Harrison:
We’ll give you kind of t-shirt sizing: small, medium, large, good, better, best, and let you test and control different options. And we’re happy then to help distribute it anywhere you want to in the digital world. We can get it anywhere from Facebook and Twitter to The Trade Desk, MediaMath. Wherever you want to go, I can pretty much get the data to you because of you guys, and because of things like UID2.

Kyle Hollaway:
As you’ve been working with clients through this past 18-24 months, with all this noise in the market around deprecation and such, we’ve just been talking about. How’s performance been? What have you seen on the ground as you’re executing these efforts for clients? Have you seen a big drop off? Are you seeing alternatives?

Linda Harrison:
Well, I’m seeing an increase in price on some platforms. I think everyone knows that Facebook and Instagram and Twitter have dramatically increased their CPMs, but I’ve not seen a big decrease in performance. So people have to be smart and set their KPIs and set their number of touches, and those types of things.

Linda Harrison:
But other than that, things are pretty much rocking along as they always have. In my world, it’s almost much to do about nothing, because you guys and the ecosystem is getting the data where it needs to be. I’m making the recommendation and making it happen, and helping clients in some cases test what their scale is going to be when it gets there.

Dustin Raney:
One of the things that listeners and clients or customers are also super interested in is always around privacy and how we manage or how we decide what sources of data we bring in and make use of. Can you share a little bit about kind of what we do, the process we take to make sure all that data is privacy compliant and consent-based?

Linda Harrison:
Yeah. I’ll use an old Sheila Colclasure remark: Just because it can be done, doesn’t mean it should be done. Right? So Acxiom takes consumer access notice and choice very seriously, and we bring together data so that it’s fair for all parties involved.

Linda Harrison:
We have information about age, gender, presence of children, but we’re not going to market to children themselves. We’re only going to market to adults over age 18. And we have a team that creates the data, and then we have the privacy impact assessment team that looks at the uses of the data. We set lots of guardrails in place. And then we simply don’t do some things that could be done, but we’ve decided not to. If it’s sensitive data… I had a client the other day wanting to target to people who had a need for a certain medication.

Linda Harrison:
I’m not going to target to people based on some medication requirements. I’m not going to target people based on their sexual orientation. That’s just not something Acxiom’s going to do. Gambling is another one, because it could be considered embarrassing or sensitive. There’s things that we could provide in the marketplace, but we’re simply not going to. Acxiom helps you with marketing to the right people for the right things in a privacy-compliant way.

Linda Harrison:
Because we don’t want you to be on the front page of the New York Times for marketing something that shouldn’t be in the marketplace, that they just haven’t considered all the implications of. That’s what we act as, another guardrail on the team to say, “Hey, we really need to include age 21+ on that.” Or, “This should only go to this market area. It’s not legal in all states.” Like cannabis, we’re not going to market cannabis. It’s just something that Acxiom is not comfortable doing at this point in time.

Dustin Raney:
Yeah. I know another area, kind of down that same path, is the use of artificial intelligence or machine learning. Basically taking in all this information on people’s browser history, across the entire, maybe, US population. And it learning and basically maybe causing some not-so-positive outcomes on how that data’s collected, can you talk about that a little bit?

Linda Harrison:
See Google FloC for further information. We don’t use any online behavioral information because of that purpose. You could have been researching it. You might have heard a word and not understood what it was and you end up on a site that you clearly didn’t intend to look at.

Linda Harrison:
Which happened to me. Don’t shorten that URL at work. We’re not going to use that type of data because it can misguide you and it can be potentially embarrassing. Some of my searches are informational. Some of them are on a need-to-know basis. I don’t want anyone in my family to know that I looked at or thought about said thing.

Kyle Hollaway:
Obviously then for Acxiom, for probably a broader swath of the industry, the process of partnering with folks, as you mentioned, as well as building our own data assets. But there’s a lot of rigor that’s going into the compilation of those data sets, and the privacy aspect of that. What’s going into… What are even the topics and propensities that we are targeting as part of that.

Kyle Hollaway:
And then that’s being exposed through kind of the catalog, and then your Data Guru team is able to work with clients, with brands to understand who are they trying to reach in general, and then be able to hone that down into a particular audience segmentation that you feel like is going to do the best.

Linda Harrison:
That’s right. And so we’ll take what they ask for. And then we try and give them that little something extra, something maybe they didn’t consider. Maybe they asked for people in market for a Slim Jim, which I use this as an interview question. So if you ever want to be on Data Guru team, start thinking about it now because it opens up some creativity and it gives me insight into how your mind works. Who wants to eat a Slim Jim? Maybe you’re a long distance truck driver.

Linda Harrison:
Maybe you’re a high protein eater. Maybe you’re lower income. Maybe you’re a hunter, things like that. You are up all night, but we’ll give them some of those ideas. And then things that they never really thought about. Maybe they didn’t think about fishermen or hobbies and interests.

Linda Harrison:
They only thought about who goes to 7/11 between 11:00 PM and 3:00 AM. So we try and give them those little extra ideas on how to market their product that they can then bring to… If I’m working in an agency, they’ll bring it to their client. And the client goes, “Wow. We never considered that as something that would be relevant, and you’re right. When we really dig deep into the data, that’s a lot of my clientele.”

Dustin Raney:
On the other end of that, if you have 11,000 different data elements, you might be surprised what data element might tell you, “This is a Slim Jim consumer.” So a lot of times it’s like letting the data speak for itself.

Dustin Raney:
And that’s where modeling and taking all this data and pushing it into that’s kind of scoring to help understand what’s popping. What is it that if I bring in a lot of Slim Jim users or customers, what is it that they all have in common? That’s another way that it can be used.

Linda Harrison:
Right. And I tend to get a lot of head nodding when I do that, when I build a model or when I do a data portrait analysis. I have the AARP file. Wow. No big surprise. Most of them are over age 50. Wow. But I can give them other insights too.

Linda Harrison:
Like their income level, geographic differences, interest in grandparenting. How many of them are raising kids themselves at this point in their life so that they can then think about other offerings that they should be considering? Like, they didn’t realize that 20% of their file are raising their grandkids. So that’s something that they can latch onto and do other things with.

Kyle Hollaway:
As you’re looking at the future and you’ve just, like I said, kind of been through the last couple of years. You’re still seeing good performance across the board. You’re seeing that the industry’s kind of correcting some of its own challenges. What do you recommend to brands? If you’re just going to get out there and just tell a brand like, “Hey, this is what you need to be thinking about doing in 2022-2023.” What are you saying?

Linda Harrison:
I toe the company line on this one because I believe it… That first party data is becoming even more important, that you really need to understand who your current customers are. Get all the information you can about them, get all the different contact points about them, because that’s pure gold. And then to augment that, come to Acxiom for further details on how you can mix and match and find more and dig deeper into that little nugget of gold to make it better. What do you tell people?

Kyle Hollaway:
Well, certainly right along those same lines is the fact that, again, the brand is the one who is having the interaction largely with the client, with the customer. And so they have that opportunity to really engage on that one-to-one level, understand Kyle and my preferences and my purchase behaviors.

Kyle Hollaway:
Whatever specifically that brand, and then being able to capture all of that and then be able to expose that, like you’re saying, to modeling and into some data augmentation. Some enrichment to say, “What do I not know about Kyle now that I really understand who Kyle means to me as a brand? What other insights can I add to that that can then, one, help me to further my relationship with Kyle because it’s really…” We’ve always known that it’s true that it’s easier to maintain a customer than it is to acquire a new customer.

Kyle Hollaway:
So what can I do to get more insights about Kyle to meet his future needs, as well as then, how do I find more Kyle’s? How do I take those characteristics, take those behaviors that I’m experiencing with him directly and then go and say, “How do I find more like that, that I can pursue to lower that cost of acquisition because I’m actually targeting people that have a natural propensity towards my brand.” That’s kind of what we’re saying. Dustin, I know you’ve got some thoughts.

Dustin Raney:
I think just to kind of extend what Kyle just said, and honestly what you’ve also said, Linda, is what marketing or advertising is working. And can I bring that in and start making use of that on top of everything that’s happening? Like when people visit my owned media, so can I make use of paid media impressions?

Dustin Raney:
Spending potentially millions and millions of dollars on advertising campaigns. It’s like, am I getting intelligence out of that? I think there’s opportunities with technology in play today to make use of all that data and really extend even what we consider really first party data. You know, you nailed it.

Dustin Raney:
You know as much about your customers and then augment that. Also, kind of think outside the box. I think a lot of players out there kind of want you to just rent from them all the time. And I think there’s an opportunity for brands to take more control and ownership with some of the technology that’s in market.

Kyle Hollaway:
It’s a great call out. The reality is we are actually bumping up on our time. And as usual, it went way faster than anticipated. So Linda, I really appreciate you joining us and sharing your insights. I know that I’m sure we have listeners that were intrigued by Data Guru and the value that you guys can bring to their marketing efforts and such. Hopefully that’ll peak some interest and some opportunity as folks come to Acxiom and look to have their own session with the Data Guru, Linda Harrison. Thank you for joining us today, Linda.

Linda Harrison:
Thanks for having me. It was a lot of fun.

Kyle Hollaway:
All right. So as we’re wrapping up, for our listeners, you can find all of our Real Identity podcast episodes at acxiom.com/realtalk. And you can also find Linda on the Data Guru by Acxiom podcasts at acxiom.com, or on your favorite podcast player. Thanks for listening and I look forward to future episodes.