In our recent Q&A with Affinity Answers, Josh Raper, VP Marketing sheds light on the best use for Affinity Answers' audiences, why data quality matters and shares his predictions for 2021.
Affinity Answers is described as a data science marketing company, can you share more information about your business?
Affinity Answers was started a little over 12 years ago as MySpace was finishing their meteoric rise through the social ranks. When MySpace started focusing on music, they became the first real platform that allowed musicians, bands, and other artists to have a real 1-1 connection with their fans. That inspired our founders to find a way to use social data to help marketers across every industry – entertainment, brand, music, etc.
Why have you chosen to partner with Eyeota?
Many reasons. It began as an opportunity to focus on markets inside and outside of the US through their massive global footprint. Most importantly though, it is Eyeota’s belief in the importance of data transparency and quality. They were the one of the first to become Neutronian certified. We are happy to announce that we have followed their lead and also received our Neutronian certification.
How are Affinity Answers audiences relevant for advertisers?
Affinity Answers creates audiences by analyzing the social engagements between over 550MM people and 70,000 brands, movies, TV shows, digital properties, and more. This vast amount of engagements provides a 360º picture of what customers are buying, watching, reading, listening to and surfing. Which means, if a customer is into it, we can find them and deliver them to you at scale.
How should marketers best use Affinity Answers audiences?
Our audiences are collected and organized at a brand level, which is more granular than broad interest level data. This makes our audiences ideal for Conquest Strategies, Penetration Strategies, and Amplification of artist, movie, or TV promotions or sponsorships.
What are your data predictions for 2021?
It has been discussed and debated over the last few years, but in 2021 we will see Unified ID 2.0 become the predominant standard for interoperability leading up to the third-party cookie deprecation on Google Chrome.
Impact 1: DSPs, Data Marketplaces and Data partners that align to this Universal ID will reign in most of the Data budget.
Impact 2: Buyers will appreciate this alternative to the Walled Gardens.
Buyers will look for quality targeting/addressable data, which has been fuzzy until now. With efforts by Neutronian, IAB Tech Lab, Truthset as new and evolving standards, buyers can more easily identify validated/certified data and the long-tail of low-quality data will gradually be eliminated, helping reduce wastage on ad fraud.
Data Licensing will become a viable business model, beyond transactional data for targeting/addressability. First-party data owners will look to enrich their data with Quality data to give a more robust picture of their customers to generate their own Insights/Analytics for personalization and media planning.
With Eyeota, Affinity Answers audiences are globally available in APAC, the US and Europe for omnichannel campaign activation on display, mobile and social channels including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest and Snapchat. For more information about Affinity Answers, connect with an audience specialist today at datadesk@eyeota.com.
