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eXelate’s Data Digest is the best way to keep up with our most recent news and offerings. We never stop bringing you the most unique, high impact data available in digital advertising. The Data Digest brings you the latest on how we are helping hundreds of online advertisers make better digital marketing decisions each month.

Our newsletters are sent twice monthly. We will highlight new segments and recent eXelate news as well as showcase some of our premiere data verticals, including travel, auto, and specific services.

Recent Newsletters

• CPG Data: eXelate continues to lead the industry in distributing CPG data. Marketers often find that CPG data is an indicator of ongoing offline purchase behavior. It is imperative that CPG data remain fresh and at scale, and eXelate offers the timeliest CPG data. In this newsletter we provide a breakdown of the different CPG categories eXelate has to offer, like beverages, groceries, and health and beauty segments.
• Purchase Behavior Data: Users who exhibit a specific type of purchase behavior are part of a new interest segment sourced from our offline providers. This newsletter delves into the source of this data, why it is reliable, and how best to leverage purchase behavior data.
• Finance Data: Our most recent finance newsletter outlines eXelate’s array of finance data, sourced from some of the top publishers in the financial world. Read about our finance data partners and see how you can incorporate financial data into your campaigns or with maX™ data.

This week’s newsletter highlights recent eXelate news.

• Turn integrates with eXelate
• Spring Break travel trends
• Modeling eXposed 2012

If you are not already on our mailing list, visit our Facebook page to sign up or email our marketing team.

Much Ado About Nothing: Why the Cookie Craze?

In the Wired article “Stop the Do Not Track Madness,” Lauren Weinstein takes issue with the controversy around “Do Not Track” functionality for browsers to block cookies.  As he notes, “emotion and political gamesmanship have often replaced common sense and logic to no good end.”  As someone who has worked with internet technologies since the development of ARPANET  in the 70s, I respect his perspective on this issue.

We see groups making an emotional appeal to the press/consumers that cookies are by default a bad thing for consumers and need to be stopped. Politicians seem to be using this argument in order to score points, but they don’t truly understand how the technologies involved work or the impact their proposals would have. There have been efforts to build privacy controls directly into the browser before the Platform for Privacy Preferences Project (P3P), but ultimately those standards were not widely adopted and the impact was minimal (I believe only Internet Explorer supports P3P).  To Mr. Weinstein’s point, preventing data collection and reducing the value of web ads to advertisers is going to hurt websites that are offering content and services at no cost to the visitor.

Industry self-regulation efforts to date have worked to provide transparency and multiple levels of control to consumers when it comes to interest data being collected online.

• The first level of control that the consumer has is the cookie itself – cookies are inherently temporary storage mechanisms.
• The second level of control is restricting the kind of data that companies can collect.
• A third level of control over most companies in the space is to completely open the kimono and be transparent to the consumer about the information we have in a cookie about them and give them the ability to change those preferences or delete the cookie altogether.

We were one of the early advocates for consumer transparency – our preference manager was one of the first projects our R&D team built. By collecting only aggregate data points,  not collecting personally-identifiable data, keeping that data for only a short period of time, and being transparent to the consumer about what targeting attributes are associated with their cookies, we believe the trade-off to more relevant ads that are more valuable to advertisers and websites will make for a positive web experience – for all parties involved.

Using the maX Index to find Spring Break Travel Trends

Marketers seeking to understand consumer demographics, interests, intent or branded segments according to user geography are now able to do so with eXelate’s maX Index, our market-level insights on segments that index high or low for any DMA or state. Based on eXelate’s unparalleled reach as well as our premium and syndicated audience segments, we are able to pull data from millions of unique user IDs and billions of transactions to tell if a specific geographic area is more or less likely to search or click.

For April, we pulled the top Spring Break Travel Trends. Some interesting finds:

• People in the Miami/Ft. Lauderdale area are 4.27 times more interested in travel to Spain compared to others in the US
• People in Manhattan are 4.28 times more interested in travel to the Netherlands than others in the US
• People in Austin, TX are 2.61 times more interested in travel to Germany

Click here to download.

Were you surprised at the places these DMAs are likely to travel to? Read the full story and give your two cents at MediaPost.

Occupy eXelate (Jobs)

In light of the big “day of action” by Occupy Wall Street on Tuesday, I thought it was an appropriate time to talk about a common theme of the protests: jobs. Over and over again we hear the chants of “jobs for the 99%.”

However, the positions of the protesters stand in stark contrast to the reality that my company and many ad tech start-ups face in NYC every day – too many jobs and not enough great people to fill them.

Currently at eXelate we have over 10 positions that have been challenging to fill at various levels of experience. And, in speaking with colleagues at other start-ups, they are experiencing the same issue. Meanwhile, recruiters are raking in the dough hand over fist to squeeze round pegs into square holes, while young, smart people are marching for more opportunity. Where is the disconnect?

I don’t profess to be an economist (though I did play one on TV), but in my opinion, the real factors that are making it hard to find folks to fill key tech roles in NYC boils down to:

1. Education. We aren’t training either undergrads or MBAs to be competitive in the new economy. Grades as opposed to practical application and theory as opposed to practice are still the focus of an educational system that continues to train our young people as though they will all work at GE. The days of large multi-nationals driving domestic growth are over. Innovation is the key to our future. We need to educate our young people to take ownership, not orders; to think out of the box, not how to pack it better.
2. Expectations. Now I am going to sound like my Dad (I guess I am a Dad so it is OK), but the concepts of “10^th-place-gets-a trophy-T-Ball”, reality television as an easy path to riches, and the glamorization of any job that isn’t in an office (Mad Men excluded) have created the unrealistic expectation of what “rewarding” employment means. Interestingly enough however, I think that life in a start-up is one of the best ways to really experience the excitement of the highs and lows in life in an environment that tends to be much more inclusive (and yes, even coddling) than most large firms can offer. Sending this message loud and clear to our candidate pool can help slowly make an image change.
3. Risk Taking. Start-ups fail…often. And start-ups in ad tech are no exception. Although there is uncertainty in any job, in any era, the recent recession seems to have created a generation fearful of taking risks when it comes to their future. This hurts the ability of an industry growing as quickly as ours to sustain that growth. We need to do a better job communicating the benefits of creative destruction for prospective employees and not penalizing those who have been part of a “failed enterprise.” They most likely learned far more than those who have only seen success.

We have one of the best teams in ad tech at eXelate, and we are always looking for great people who are looking to break new ground. As one of our newest team members noted when asked why she joined: “I didn’t want to be a cog in the machine. I wanted to be a part of a team that could get things done from day one.”

If you are interested in being more than a “cog in the machine” – take a shot at joining our team by contacting us directly. You can view all of our openings here.

Combining Data to Create Powerful Modeling

The Netflix Tech Blog recently posted an entry that discusses their recommendation algorithms and outlined the Netflix Prize, a machine learning and data mining competition to predict movie ratings. The 2009 winner of the contest improved Netflix’s ratings prediction system by more than 10% with a new algorithm. For a company owing 75% of viewership to recommendations, this would seem to be a huge step for Netflix. They didn’t adopt the winner of the contest, however – and the reasoning is perfectly logical.

The winning algorithm focused mainly on predicting ratings. Ratings are an important source of data for Netflix, but new types of analyses & inputs beyond ratings alone have emerged, all of which can help Netflix create even better recommendations. These include context, movie title popularity, novelty, diversity and freshness.

If you’ve been reading this blog or our Twitter handle for the last 2 months, then you are probably familiar with maX™ – or Modeled Audience eXtension, our custom modeling product that helps advertisers build a scaled audience with broad reach that is 3-5x more likely to respond to their campaigns.

We make it work by focusing on all the data – the advertiser’s first party data as well our eXelate premium marketplace data. And we look at as many data points as possible, including demographic, lifestyle, intent, behavior, brand affinity information and other proprietary data sets many advertisers may not have access to. We’ve learned, as Netflix seems to have, that combining multiple forms of data can prove to be the most powerful way to reach an audience. If you were Netflix, what would you have done?

Ad Age Digital: Connecting Madison Avenue with Silicon Valley

eXelate is proud to be a sponsor of the 2012 Ad Age Digital Conference, taking place over the next two days at the Metropolitan Pavilion in the Chelsea neighborhood of NYC. Ad Age always puts on a good conference, and after already hearing from the CEO of Hulu and Gap’s CMO, this one is quickly proving to be a premiere event in the digital marketing space. Going on year 6 of holding the Digital conference, Ad Age boasts over 700 high-level attendees and speakers as well as jam-packed workshops and plenty of networking opportunities.

In her opening remarks, Ad Age Editor Abbey Klaassen pointed out that in the past, the conference centered around how marketers reacted to the digital space. These days, it’s about how marketers are engaging with the digital space – and that’s what we’re all about. We will be here all day to answer any and all questions. Come by to talk to one of our sales or marketing team members and learn how we’re helping digital marketers make the best advertising decisions with our premium, syndicated, and maX modeled data sets.

Also, be sure to follow the conversation on twitter – look for #aadigital.

Closing the Loop on Data-Driven Ad Strategies

“The disruption of traditional media” – it’s a phrase we constantly hear from marketers. With the promise of “Big Data,” digital marketers are furiously discussing and debating its importance, how it’s disrupting traditional media as well as its effects on advertising to consumers. It all boils down to one thing – ROI. Agencies and marketers need to understand the latest advancements in information and technology so they can continue to reach consumers in meaningful ways.

At the Digiday Agency Summit in Utah, we took to the stage to evangelize this message. Accompanied by Nielsen’s Andrew Feigenson, our VP of Sales Jeff Huter presented “Identify, Target, Measure: Closing the Loop on Data-Driven Ad Strategies.”

The bread and butter of the presentation is this: online data works. Marketers need to take advantage of big data, and we’ve outlined the best practices for doing so.

1. Identify your key audience. Use first party data to pinpoint similar attributes and overlay third party data to learn even more about these users.

2. Target these users. First and third party data combined with market data and modeled data (maX) can help you get your ad in front of the right audience.

3. Measure your audience. See if you’re achieving the most scale you can and reaching customers you can convert.

Start getting your ads in front of the right people. Download the presentation here.

March Madness Sees Spike in Travel Intent

March Madness has come and gone, leaving the Kentucky Wildcats the victors of the esteemed college basketball tourney. Kentucky took on the Kansas Jayhawks on April 2 to determine the national title following their defeat of the Louisville Cardinals and Kansas’ defeat of the Ohio State Buckeyes. The Final Four duked it out in New Orleans, so we decided to watch for spikes in travel to Louisiana. Here’s what we found:

Travel from Kentucky and Kansas to Louisiana spiked between March 24 and 30, peaking on the 26th.

We also saw a spike in college basketball-related behavior at the beginning of March as well as the beginning of April:

College basketball interest spikes in the beginning of March and April, then quickly recedes.

Interest recedes through the month of March then picks up again at the beginning of April, right before the championship game. Following the game on April 2, college basketball interest again dipped down.

Are you glad that all the madness of March is over? Or are you enjoying your bracket winnings?

Q&A with V12 Group

This week, eXelate announced our partnership with V12 Group, a leading provider of offline premium data and data technology. Our alliance with V12 Group allows us to continue to help digital marketers make the best marketing decisions through actionable data. We sat down with Kelly Leger, VP Digital Solutions, V12 Group, to learn more about V12 Group, their data, and their thoughts on the new partnership.

• What is V12 Group hoping to see from their partnership with eXelate?

We are so excited to partner with eXelate.  Strong strategic partners such as eXelate help elevate awareness of the offline to online data boom happening in the advertising display marketplace. We hope to see a strong partnership that exposes V12 Group’s unique data to eXelate’s clients, thereby creating success for both of our businesses.  We value eXelate’s forward thinking stance on marrying media and data, as well as your strong privacy standards.

• Tell us about V12 Group’s data and why it is unique.

V12 Group owns our data as well as a data warehouse facility. We scrub and rebuild our file quarterly – so our data is highly accurate. We strive to make our audience segments easy to understand at every level of the process: explaining to clients, filling out an RFP, etc.  We believe that accurate data will win out every time, in every campaign.

• eXelate is excited to bring V12 Group’s automotive and PYCO personality profiles online. Where does V12 Group’s automotive data come from?

V12 Group’s auto data is a subset of our vast consumer database of over 200 million consumers covering 110 million households, which is compiled from over 40 data sources. Our automotive data is comprised of over 130 million offline vehicle records, all matched at the household level.  The 100% privacy compliant file is compiled from a proprietary collection of auto services, including insurance, warranties, vehicle maintenance, driver statistics, manufacturer’s promotions, title services, government sources, online sources, parts providers and public records. We are seeing great results with our auto data and continue to gain market share in this space. The ability to have this data available in eXelate’s platform is one of the main reasons we formed a strategic partnership between the two companies.

• V12 Group’s PYCO Personality Profiles are based on the Myer’s-Briggs Personality Type Indicator and use 320 different data points to accurately assign a personality type to 85% of American consumers aged 18 and above. How can this data being brought online benefit digital marketers?

We are seeing a great demand for our PYCO data set.  The PYCO data set is something the display marketplace can use in multiple ways. We are seeing clients apply this data to creative messaging – showing different sets of creative to extroverts versus introverts;  PYCO is an answer to that intangible request that comes through in RFPs; we’ve seen it used in Auto, Travel, and Finance verticals, to name a few.

We’re looking forward to providing V12 Group data as a vital tool for digital marketers leveraging data via the eXelate platform. Click here to learn more about V12 Group.

Watch How maX Can Help Digital Advertisers

eXelate’s maX was released in February and is the latest in a line of products from eXelate meant to aid digital advertisers in making the best marketing decisions.

maX is a product that uses our Adaptive Audience IntelligenceTM (AAI) process to recognize the characteristics of your best performers. To learn more about AAI, please click here.

maX’s benefits include:

• Customization. Because we use your campaign’s specific goals to create the audience, it won’t be resold.
• Reach. eXelate uses the largest pool on the web with 350 million UV, to ensure the biggest scale.
• Power. maX delivers 3-5 better campaign results versus conventional targeting.
• Flexibility. Your custom audience can be delivered on any media platform.

Check it out:

 

Contact Jeff Huter to get started today!