Two years ago, Neustar was taken private when Golden Gate Capital acquired it for $2.9 billion.
Since then, the company has focused its marketing industry offering around three areas: marketing analytics, first-party data services and identity resolution. Many of these capabilities were brought into Neustar through acquisitions of companies like MarketShare, TRUSTID, Aggregate Knowledge and TARGUSinfo.
This week on the podcast, CEO Charlie Gottdiener talks about how Neustar has sought to build on those holdings by investing in engineering and data science. This is particularly true of analytics and attribution (formerly MarketShare).
“We’re really focused on making our analytics business larger, unifying our capabilities, and getting better at the execution,” Gottdiener says. “To deliver on multi-touch attribution [is] a huge data exercise. You’re taking data inputs from all kinds of different marketing channels. You have to match them together and you have to apply them to the analytical model. To do that well, it’s a huge data problem.”
Also in this episode: Neustar’s business metrics, the manual work of cleaning data and the bifurcation of the United States and Europe when it comes to regulations like GDPR.
“Our customers are as worried about it as we are,” Gottdiener says of new laws like GDPR and CCPA. “Think about a big bank. They have all kinds of information on you. They need help on how to manage that data well and serve that consumer better.”