Q&A with Chris Morse, Director of Digital Partnerships, about Alliant's transaction sourced audiences, leading the industry requirements for data quality & transparency, and the opportunities for brands and marketers using data in 2021.
Can you introduce yourself, your role and responsibilities?
As Director of Platform Partnerships at Alliant, I am the point person for Alliant’s platform relationships across ad-tech. My role is to develop strategic relationships with leading platforms to provide great audience targeting for our shared brand and agency clients. For existing partnerships I also handle operations, which includes the onboarding of thousands of syndicated and custom audiences, distribution, generating awareness and training to ensure that all of our platform partners feel comfortable activating and recommending Alliant data.
Alliant is described as “The Audience Company”. Can you share more information about the business?
Since 2003, Alliant has been an independent data and analytics partner solely focused on enabling marketers to target relevant audiences, in any channel. Alliant aggregates and operates a proprietary database, the DataHub, which is a unique second-party transactional data asset built directly from first-party CRM data. Transaction sourced audiences are the holy grail of data, and Alliant has one of the largest assets (billions of transactions) in the market.
Why have you chosen to partner with Eyeota?
Eyeota’s strong tech and integrations are a key for distribution success, but the team is a standout in the industry. Exceptional account, sales and marketing professionals work closely with our team, forming a true partnership. Both sides look for new and exciting ways to bring powerful, transactional audiences to marketers.
How are Alliant audiences relevant for advertisers?
In case you couldn’t tell by now – we are passionate about transactional data. Past purchases are the strongest indicator of future purchasing intent and leveraging deterministic purchase data is the most effective way to get in front of relevant buyers. And in today’s marketing world, data quality and transparency matter now more than ever. Alliant and Eyeota are both industry leaders in data transparency – having both earned certification from the IAB Tech Lab after an extensive data audit. Together Alliant and Eyeota make up 2 out of 5 total companies in the entire industry validated in this way as you can see here.
Alliant also has some other exciting data quality validation initiatives underway that we will be rolling out in 2021.
How should marketers best use Alliant audiences?
Great question, at a high level – Alliant does really well in key B2C verticals, the top of the marquee includes:
- Retail/E-Commerce (with a particular expertise in DTC)
- Auto
- Financial Services
- Subscription (including Telco)
One use case for marketers is activating Alliant’s Brand Propensity audiences. We see brands have major success targeting audiences who are likely to become customers of their own brand, but also conquesting against likely customers of their competitors. The Alliant Help Desk is an accessible resource for any questions about the taxonomy of Alliant Audiences, or how to create a custom audience for a specific campaign/KPI/target.
What are the data opportunities for brands in 2021?
2020 brought along a lot of change between different regulations, market consolidation and the crumbling of the cookie. The field of data sources began to whittle down and in 2021 brands and agencies will benefit from this, finding it easier to identify the remaining sources of audiences that are transparent, compliant and stable with greater ease. Many brands and agencies have already started to say “show me your homework” rather than relying on branded naming conventions like “auto intender”. This buyer empowerment means that data providers will have to confidently explain their sourcing of an audience, prove it through third-party validation and have it tied to a stable identifier. 2021 is an exciting time to be in the data business!
With Eyeota, Alliant audiences are available in the US for omnichannel campaign activation on display, mobile and social channels including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest and Snapchat. For more information about Alliant audiences, connect with an audience specialist today at datadesk@eyeota.com.
