Experian launches PII-matching audience targeting platform to reach 85% of the US

Experian is best known as one of those bureaus that makes sure you’re a good credit risk for a new loan.

But its Marketing Services arm has also built up a data treasure called ConsumerView. It doesn’t use the credit bureau’s data, but employs a host of other sources to construct more than 235 million detailed customer profiles with personally identifiable information (PII) that includes names, marital status, physical address, estimated household income, home value and other stats.

Today, Experian Marketing Services is announcing a new platform, called Audience Engine, that allows brands and other data holders to deterministically match their PII-based data with ConsumerView and other personally identifiable first- , second- and third-party sources. Then, anonymized, those brands can advertise to those same users in selected media environments.

Experian has a variety of media partners in online, mobile, email, direct mail and addressable TV, including Facebook, Yahoo, Viant, AOL, Dish Network, Cablevision and others.

The Audience Engine platform, Experian claims, can reach as much as 85 percent of the US population in addressable ad campaigns that definitively know you, and 100 percent of households through such addressable TV operators as Dish. It can be utilized by advertisers through demand-side platforms and data management platforms, or by publishers.

In a typical use case, Brienna Pinnow, addressable advertising product lead, told me, political data firm TargetSmart Communications might take its identified list of Democratic contributors, with names and other PII information, and match it to ConsumerView’s PII list to obtain additional insights, like estimated household incomes. Other PII data layers can be added and linked, using such connectors as name or email address.

The list is then anonymized with an Experian identifier instead of name and linked via email address or other means to, say, registered users on Yahoo. An ad campaign can then target those users on Yahoo with ads for additional political contributions. Here’s a screen from Audience Engine:

The differentiator from many such data targeting platforms, Pinnow noted, is that the Audience Engine is “people-based,” in that it employs only PII-based data, which is then used to definitively target those users elsewhere.

No cookies, no probabilistic matching. TargetSmart doesn’t have to assume that the people to whom it is directing ads are Democratic contributors, because the targeting was based on identified users.

Identified users, of course, are gold for marketers. In concept, Audience Match resembles the data targeting platform of, say, media company Viant, owner of Myspace and recently purchased by Time Inc.

In Viant’s case, as well, the matching is largely based on identified users, which Viant says includes over 200 million in the US alone. Similarly, Publishers Clearing House says it has a massive data targeting platform of over 100 million identified users.

Audience Engine is Experian Marketing Service’s latest effort to marry ConsumerView with other targeting data sources. Late last month, for instance, the company teamed up with over-the-top (OTT) TV data provider Tru Optik to share data about who watches online TV.