Modern media buyers face a landslide of data, and the more screens and channels they track, the more difficult it is to determine whether their campaigns are having any effect.
The solution is a data management platform: a service layer that collects and sorts data from ad campaigns, as well as marketers’ own in-house data and any other data they’ve managed to collect. Ideally, the buyer’s DMP chugs through all those numbers and spits out big-picture insights about the campaign – like how many in-store and online sales it drove, who the most engaged audiences were, and which creative was the most successful.
Now AOL is stepping into the DMP ring, ready to compete with players like Oracle’s BlueKai and eXelate. AOL will launch its new data platform (which, in a surprise twist, does not have a name) in the lead up to the global rollout of its One integrated ad-buying platform. The DMP will initially be available to AOL’s programmatic customers and later become a core product within the One suite.
What’s Convertro? from Convertro on Vimeo.
The tool will be directly integrated with AOL’s two buying platforms, Adlearn Open Platform and Adap.tv, and can be integrated with other third-party demand-side providers like Turn or MediaMath to collect data and inform audience targeting. The DMP will also ingest marketers’ offline data from CRM, retail purchases and loyalty programs, enabling them to connect consumers’ actual purchase behaviour with the campaign ads they’ve seen.
Leanne Gibson, AOL Canada Head of ad products and operations, said one core purpose for the platform will be bringing together display, video and linear TV data from AOL’s two platforms, AOP and Adap.tv.
“Both products are built upon ingesting and activating a mountain of data that spans display and video,” she said. “Until now, these products were built independently and the data was siloed. The aim with our DMP launch is to remove those barriers and bring the data cross-channel.”
The eventual goal is to unite all of a buyer’s offline and online data, from all traditional and digital formats, into a “single user view” – a comprehensive, quantifiable understanding of their audience across all screens, channels and publishers.
AOL hopes to differentiate its DMP from others in the market by baking in multi-touch attribution capabilities from Convertro, the attribution measurement company AOL purchased earlier this year. MTA tracks the relative performance of ads that a consumer sees on the path to purchase, and determines how they each contributed to purchase decisions. Based on this analysis, MTA generates real-time suggestions for updating and optimizing a campaign’s media mix.
Insights generated by AOL’s data and attribution platform can be fed back into AOL’s other products and third-party buying tools to refine programmatic audience targeting, optimize ongoing campaigns, and inform future media planning.
The One platform, which combines these functions, will depend on the DMP’s single user view to target and optimize cross-screen campaign buys, making it an essential component of the still-hypothetical super-platform. “By pulling this data together, we’re making a massive step closer to making One a reality,” said Gibson.
The announcement, timed to coincide with New York Ad Week, follows on the heels of AOL Canada’s announcement that it would be making 100% of its Canadian premium inventory available via programmatic. The DMP will power both programmatic and direct media sales.
Gibson also revealed that Convertro would be launching in Canada as a standalone attribution product in Q4. AOL’s DMP will launch in the U.S. in Q1 and shortly thereafter in international markets.
