Audience Data Sessions: Q&A with Starcount

Can you introduce yourself and your audience solutions?

I’m Rowena Humby, CEO and co-founder of data science & insights agency, Starcount.

We launched Starcount because traditionally data is heavily focused on transactions, conversions, and profit metrics. We wanted to bring data to the marketing & advertising ecosystem that reveals what people truly love and care about, empowering brands to connect emotionally with customers and build meaningful relationships.

Our heritage, as loyalty pioneers dunnhumby, position us as leaders in humanizing data and understanding consumer behaviour. At Starcount, we have combined and developed the best data sources to understand what people love, where they shop and most importantly, WHY they buy.

Our innovative algorithm combines signals from multiple behavioural data sets across social media, banking spend transactions, demographics and consumption behaviour to reveal the true motivations of consumers.

To make this data set actionable, we have pioneered an approach to map all our audience data sets to granular geographies, meaning we are the first in the market to have matched social media behaviours and open banking data to full postcode. This proves a popular approach for advertisers as it provides an ID-less, privacy-first and future-proofed targeting solution.

Why have you partnered with Eyeota?

Whilst Starcount’s data is built for omnichannel activation, our partnership with Eyeota expands our ability to activate our audiences in the most loved digital publisher’s environments.

For the past few years, our clients have championed Starcount’s data for the insights it provides on their existing customers, as well as the ability to acquire new addressable audiences, and so we listened to their desire for us to enhance our integrations in the digital ecosystem.

Working with an established player like Eyeota empowers us to offer a full end-to-end capability; from audience insight to planning to digital activation. The reason we chose to partner with Eyeota is their great reputation for bringing the best data sets to the advertising ecosystem through their relationships with leading, reputable digital publishers. Their ability to translate our postcode data into addressable segments for advertisers is hugely valuable and a partnership we are very proud of.

In which markets do you operate?

Currently, Starcount’s UK data is available via Eyeota. We are currently developing our US product data set and will be launching that later this year. What this space!

Can you discuss the importance of audience data in today’s digital advertising landscape?

Audience data is a hot topic right now and will no doubt continue to be for the next few years. The industry is in flux and changes in legislation mean there is a demise in ID-level data sets for targeting available in the market. These laws have shined a spotlight on data privacy and specifically its credibility, meaning marketers are more tuned into the data they use, where it comes from and how it’s collected. However, marketers still want to maintain results by delivering the most effective campaigns we can – for both brand and consumer.

Starcount is agile and we pride ourselves on consistently being a step ahead to ensure our approach is future-proofed and compliant for all our partners. We build contextual audience segments and leverage the power of geography to ensure all our data is addressable, relevant and targeted.

Ultimately, data privacy is in place to protect individuals’ privacy, but this doesn’t mean we cannot continue to empower advertisers to deliver relevant, targeted and purpose-led marketing. Consumers still want to see marketing that’s relevant to them, their passions and interests.

How can businesses leverage data to improve advertising strategies?​

Currently, there is a lot of talk in the market about the value of 1st party data. And whilst there is immense value in understanding your own audience, it is often not enough. It typically gives a very narrow view of behaviours, and most data owners will see 80% of activity coming from less than 20% of their audience.

At Starcount we champion that the more you know about your customers, the more you understand their needs and wants, so you can be more relevant and connect emotionally. This requires having dynamic, up-to-date, actionable data at your fingertips to show what your audience loves and cares about most.

Advertisers who will succeed moving forward will be those who can leverage data to provide a complete and deeper understanding of their audiences. They will implement it as part of their media strategy – everything from data-driven content & creative, to planning, to targeting campaigns and measurement.

Interested in using Starcount audiences for your digital advertising campaigns?