Omnicom is going “all in” with a singular Data Management Platform offering that will support audience segmentation and ad optimization across its two key media agencies, OMD and PHD. Driving the platform consolidation is a deal with Aggregate Knowledge, a DMP recently acquired by Neustar for $119 million.
Like many agencies, Omnicom already supported DMP functionality, but it was fragmented across agencies and clients. The Neustar/Aggregate Knowledge partnership standardizes its offering.
As its name suggests, the Annalect DMP is housed within Omnicom’s Annalect data and measurement unit. Annalect integrates with many Omnicom agencies, and not only for media execution. For instance, RAPP uses Annalect’s tie-in with Salesforce to corral CRM data in support of digital marketing communications.
Such de-siloization is at the core of Annalect’s pitch to clients. As clients begin to combine data sets, the thinking goes, they’ll see cost efficiencies, get better audience benchmarks, and make smarter strategic buying decisions. And Omnicom, in turn, will then realize efficiencies of scale in future data-driven optimization efforts.
OMD and PHD will roll out the DMP in January. Countries in the “first wave” include the US, the UK, Australia, Canada, the Czech Republic, France, Mexico, and United Arab Emirates.
In an interesting aside, the companies stated Aggregate Knowledge remains the only DMP with unfettered visibility into Amazon’s publisher inventory. Unrelated but related: Data processing will be supported by Amazon Web Services.
Any news item involving Omnicom must include a statement on the post-Publicis merger implications. Here’s what Omnicom has to say on that: “Speculating on a post-merger world, there would be nothing to prevent implementation across the board. The client benefit of that much audience data would be immense.”
AdExchanger spoke with Hagedorn for more on the “Annalect DMP.”
AdExchanger: Why Aggregate Knowledge?
SCOTT HAGEDORN: We tested pretty much everybody. We were using Turn in the US previously.
Two things. AK was neutral from a DSP perspective, and they had deep integrations into Facebook and Amazon that were unique. [AK CEO] David Jakubowski’s understanding of analytics sets us up for doing a lot of interesting automated attribution work within the data environment. And he’s giving us the ability to do all our own data plumbing, if you will. Instead of going through BlueKai, we can also light up our own data deals (although I think we’ll work with BlueKai inside the AK environment). He’s basically letting us have control over the API for data feeds.
Does Neustar bring anything special on its own, outside of AK?
Yeah, for sure. Neustar is extremely interesting for two reasons. First, they have a massive amount of CRM and shopper data that they already have pre-populated. They feed data to Catalina and other shopper marketing providers, and that’s already inherent in the DMP.
And then they do a lot of cross-connect work in the US for mobile devices. They’re the firm that handles all the number portability between AT&T, Sprint, Verizon and T-Mobile. For me that was the icing on the cake, because it sets us up for having a very mobile enabled DMP in a world where cookies could go away very quickly.
What about clients who bring their own DMP?
It’s certainly interesting from a client perspective. We haven’t heard these massively resonant case studies, where the Cokes and P&Gs of the world have tried to bring the DMP in house and run their own trading organization where it’s been smashingly successful.
If I were on the client side I’d be very interested in creating a new marketplace out of CRM and first party data… That’s a very alluring proposition. I’m glad the industry is overall going there. The reason we’re doing this at an enterprise level — and paying for it for all the clients — is because we really want to take the industry there, and we want to do it across all digital, not just programmatic or RTB touch points.
Where does this fit in your partner ecosystem? You have a big integration with Salesforce.
We’re working toward a bigger arrangement where we can be focused completely on the outcomes… Salesforce, the AK piece, and some of the work we’re doing with Rubicon and other SSPs brings us close to having our own assembled stack.
How are you disclosing data use to clients?
That’s one of the big reasons we went with AK. We could have built our own, but this is independent from us. Some clients want to run a private DMP – to make sure their data is never comingled. Some want to make sure their data is destroyed after a certain amount of time.
If they want to go under the hood with AK directly and [audit against] how we contractually agreed to handle the data, they’re free to do that at any time.
Anything you can say on your tech ownership strategy? Is AK cobbled with some of your own technology?
We’ve built some reporting into AK. We’re also rolling out Integral Ad Science in China and the US, and we systems-integrated the two of them so we can do ad verification on 100% of client buys. And on top of that we’ve brought AK’s data sets into the Annalect planning tools.
How do you at Annalect realize efficiencies of scale in data while also securing client data?
The sheer data this will spit out will give us a topographical map of the internet. Out of the gate, we’ve built reports that look at cumulative reach & frequency views by clients. You can start smoothing out reach & frequency so it’s not excessive and never-under. That’s the value proposition.
Where I ultimately want to get with my client is to link conversion data when we see an audience down-funnel — what they look like from a lead dispositioning perspective… and then start to optimize toward lifetime value for a client. That’s where Salesforce becomes really important.
What else?
We’re the first ones to do it across all digital touch points, and we’re the first ones to do it on our own dime.
This will become our targeting engine of the future. When we start to plug it into the Google stack, the Apple stack, the Microsoft stack, the Amazon stack, this will be the way we unite the different ways they view audiences so we can trade in a mobile future.
