Tag: Identity Resolution

Data Axle Audience360

Marketing and Business Intelligence vendor Data Axle unveiled Audience360, its suite of data management capabilities that consist of front-end data capture, data management, and data distribution.  Enterprise data is ingested via APIs or FTP and then processed through a suite of cleansing, standardization, enrichment, identity resolution, and deduplication modules.

Data Axle offers US and Canadian business, consumer, and B2C linked datasets for enrichment and identity resolution.  Data Axle also announced significant improvements to its reference databases.  That announcement will be covered in tomorrow’s post.

Audience360 supports multi-source data ingestion, data management, and data distribution.

Once cleansed and enriched, data can be sent to a broad set of enterprise platforms, including:

  • CDP: Tealium, ActionIQ
  • CRM: Salesforce, MSD 365, Sales Genie (Data Axle’s Sales Intelligence service that provides a set of SFA capabilities)
  • MAP: Adobe (Marketo), Oracle Marketing Cloud (Eloqua)
  • Cloud: AWS, Snowflake, Google Cloud, Azure
  • DMP: LiveRamp, Lotame, TradeDesk, Oracle Data Cloud, and half a dozen other programmatic platforms.  Data Axle supports nearly one billion hashed emails to assist with targeting.
  • BI platforms: Adobe, HCL Unica, Alterian

“A lot of people struggle with the rigidity of some of the tools that are out there,” explained Data Axle SVP of Client Technology Solutions Sal Pecoraro.  “People think that when they buy a marketing cloud platform, it does all the data hygiene work.”

Audience360 lets data analysts and operations teams “design data capture, data management processing, and distribution into the system that they need,” continued Pecoraro.  It doesn’t matter whether the platforms are on-premise or hosted in the marketing cloud or S3 buckets on Amazon.

Pecoraro emphasized data security with encryption both in transport and at rest.  “If they need to anonymize data, we can match IDs, etc.  So, if there are security concerns about exporting their data to us, we can handle that through encryption and anonymization.”

He also positioned the solution as more flexible, quick to implement, and less expensive than other solutions, with a strong ROI.  Platform flexibility is “the most important thing, with support that goes beyond CDPs.  Furthermore, alternative platforms are expensive, ”large investments.”  This “rigidity” and high cost make it difficult to define a strong ROI and use case.

Conversely, “ours is much less expensive, quicker to stand up, more flexible to have those components that you need added.  You can add or remove things over time.  It’s not a black box or rigid solution that you can adjust as your business changes.  But I think flexibility [and] speed to market is some of our core value.”

And because the platform is service-based, companies don’t need to worry about training, upgrading the platform, or managing bug patches.  “We take requirements, we do configurations, we build automations, and we plug in on data receipt and export.”

Due to the system’s flexibility, pricing is bespoke based on volume, processes, and integrations.  Pricing is generated by the requirements gathering team, and implementation is passed to a design and implementation team.  Later, ownership is managed by a post-implementation support team. 

Audience360 offers an “iterative process” that lets clients add or remove processes, data sources, and integrations.

As Data Axle offers three datasets, a broad set of linkages are supported, including households, corporate families, business/consumer, and employment.

Audience360 is generally available. 

Clients include multiple healthcare companies and a large telco.  The service also supports retailers, financial services, and travel/leisure.

Continue to part II which covers Data Axle’s expanded US data coverage.

Demandbase Audience Management Destinations

ABX Platform Demandbase released one of its “largest product launches of the year”: Audience Management Destinations.  While the firm has long supported B2B Campaigns via display advertising and LinkedIn channels, Audience Management Destinations extends its reach into consumer platforms and social advertising.

“B2B buyers are people, too, and B2B marketers can and should be advertising on those channels,” said Demandbase CMO Jon Miller.

New advertising channels include Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Google, YouTube, Bing, and Adobe Audience Manager.  Additional services will be rolled out next year.

Demandbase does not store Personally Identifiable Information (PII), so its social outreach is GDPR and CCPA compliant.  Instead, Demandbase leverages LiveRamp’s identity resolution, an opted-in identifier system that matches individual identifiers across platforms.

Demandbase also expanded its integration with LinkedIn.  Previously, it only supported account-level targeting on LinkedIn, but now marketers can target at either the account or person level.

Demandbase Targeting

Marketers will build audiences using a set of selectors that include first-party data, third-party data, intent, technographics, and activities. (See the image on the right).  They can then activate campaigns to their targeted buyers across the business and social web.

“This will allow a highly consistent customer experience across social networks and other platforms,” explained Miller on LinkedIn.  In addition, the new release expands marketing’s outreach and orchestration across a broader set of channels “using the account intelligence and the Demandbase One platform.”

“We’re constantly learning about how the B2B buyer thinks and acts, and this new account-based social targeting functionality plays a role in reaching buyers more holistically,” said Miller. “By viewing the buyer not just as someone within a target account or in a buying committee, we recognize that buyers are individuals, too.  This mindset shift — and the corresponding ability to engage with them as such across business and social platforms — gives our customers yet another advantage in today’s B2B go-to-market landscape.”

Demandbase claims that it is the only system that runs both “people and account-based plays from one system.”  Marketers can target specific audiences and “then automatically apply the most effective sales and marketing tactics to advance the account in its journey, across every touchpoint, and with the most relevant messages.”

Demandbase augmented its company and contact intelligence in April with the acquisitions of InsideView and DemandMatrix.  The two firms supplemented Demandbase’s firmographics, contacts, and technographics and provided Demandbase with a set of sales intelligence, B2B DaaS, and ICP/TAM tools. 

Demandbase supports its own intent data along with partner datasets from Bombora and G2.  TrustRadius is coming soon.

“Demandbase’s solutions are stronger in certain areas and helps drive top of the funnel engagement or audience targeting, while InsideView has been more focused on bottom of the funnel data.  We realized the two companies are quite complimentary and we could combine our customers to offer a much more complete solution to all of them.  Today we have an integrated top of the funnel to bottom of the funnel marketing and sales data provision to allow customers to look at the full funnel and identify a more appropriate addressable market, including what kind of technologies those companies use.”

InsideView CEO Umberto Milletti to MarTech Series this week

The three companies combined to create a four-cloud solution that supports Advertising, ABX Marketing, Sales Intelligence, and Data.

“What’s exciting about this is the ability to provide all of this to customers as one solution,” continued Milletti.  “We have done a lot of work since the merger was completed to combine all of our technologies and go to our customers with information on how much more we can do for them.”

Demandbase combined its Demandbase One platform with InsideView and DemandMatrix to support four clouds.

D&B Connect Data Management Platform

Dun & Bradstreet launched D&B Connect, a self-service data management platform that “intuitively connects, manages and visualizes critical data across an organization using the Dun & Bradstreet Data Cloud.”  D&B Connect helps users benchmark, access, clean, enrich, and monitor their customer and contact data.

D&B Connect provides an “easy-to-use portal for managing sales and marketing data.”  The service enriches and unifies data for a “complete view of the customer.”  Along with Dun & Bradstreet firmographics, linkages, and contacts, D&B Connect enriches customer files with over 2,500 insights and supports custom data layouts.

D&B Connect builds on Dun & Bradstreet’s data management solutions for sales and marketing platforms and leverages Dun & Bradstreet’s global WorldBase file, D-U-N-S Numbers, and DUNSMatch capabilities.  These assets support identity resolution, including corporate linkages, to tie together account hierarchies, providing a unified customer view that spans regions, product lines, multiple company names, and enterprise software platforms.

D&B Connect acts as a centralized hub to manage and report on data quality in enterprise platforms, including CRMs, MAPs, ERPs, data lakes, and CDPs.  A machine learning engine normalizes input records, removing manual file preparation steps.

Users can set match quality rules and thresholds based on D&B Confidence Code, Match Grade String, and the number of match candidates to be returned.

Other features include embedded intelligence, “simplified workflows,” and “team-based controls and dashboards to improve collaboration across departments.”

D&B Connect can process millions of records “in a SOC 2 certified, CCPA, and GDPR-ready environment.”

“With D&B Connect, we put the power to manage data quality in the user’s hands, enabling our clients to reduce time spent on data management from weeks to hours,” said Michael Bird, President of Sales and Marketing Solutions at Dun & Bradstreet.  “We will continue to innovate across our sales and marketing portfolio to reduce MarTech complexity by integrating directly into the workflows of our clients so they can focus on growing their businesses.”

D&B Connect is supported by a team of 28 data advisors, each with at least ten years of experience.

In 2021, D&B Connect will be extended into finance and risk use cases.

Dun & Bradstreet has had a strong 2020 that included an IPO, the acquisitions of European partner Bisnode and firmographics vendor Orb Intelligence, and the launch of several products and services (COVID-19 Risk Data, Pipeline Risk Analysis, D&B ABM Platform, and D&B Analytics Studio).

Bombora – LiveRamp Partnership

LiveRamp - Bombora data flows for audience targeting.
LiveRamp – Bombora data flows for audience targeting.

This is Bombora week in my blog. Yesterday I covered their Bombora for Growth offering and today I’m discussing their August LiveRamp partnership. It is one of many partnerships they’ve formed over the past few years

Bombora’s latest partnership is with LiveRamp, an identity resolution firm that also supports data onboarding.  Bombora identifies audiences based on intent data to develop in-market audiences for both large and small companies.  Large company attribution is fairly straightforward as IP addresses can be employed.  For smaller companies, attribution is performed behaviorally based on thirty attributes with an 86% confidence level.

Bombora then layers in their topical surge data to determine which companies are showing high levels of intent by topic.

“What typically we’d receive from Bombora is a list of IP addresses which map a specific business profile,” said LiveRamp B2B COO Pieter De Temmerman.  “For example, we might be asked, ‘Can you find small businesses that are currently in-market to buy a CRM system, or accounting software, or you name it’.”

“What Bombora has done, and patented, is we’ve looked at IP addresses from a behavioral perspective, and because we see 30 to 40 billion business transactions a month, we’re looking at them through the lens of the behavioral attributes of a business (versus a home, Starbucks, or hotel) IP address.”

Bombora CSO Mark Dye

“What we realized is that a lot of these B2B marketers are wanting to target large companies, which are easy to identify, but are also wanting to have a conversation with the longer tail of customers,” said de Temmerman.  “When you’re dealing with these smaller companies, you might be dealing with a large number of prospects, but you don’t necessarily know who they are,”

The combined offering pulls together a set of third-party cookies and associated devices for anonymous users, expanding the universe of targetable in-market SMBs.  According to Bombora, “This solution, being the first of its kind in the B2B market, produces a high likelihood of the SMB audience to be susceptible to the ads they are seeing.  Thus, producing a higher return on ad spend and a lower customer acquisition cost.”

Bombora targets 7.5 million global SMBs with up to 100 employees based on IP addresses.  Bombora audience targeting is initially available for North America and the UK with plans to expand to additional markets “in the coming months.”

LiveRamp charges $2 per CPM for SMB targeting and $4 per CPM for Bombora surge-based SMB targeting.

Other articles on Bombora Partnerships:

Dun & Bradstreet Acquires Lattice Engines (Content + CDP)

Lattice Data Cloud

Dun & Bradstreet announced the acquisition of AI-powered Customer Data Platform (CDP) Lattice Engines yesterday.  Acquisition details were not disclosed, but the deal is expected to close within thirty days.

This is the first major deal for Dun & Bradstreet since it was taken private in February. The combined entity brings together world class company datasets (WorldBase, Global Company Authority contacts, credit data, Hoover’s) with the AI-driven Lattice Atlas Customer Data Platform.

According to the Dun & Bradstreet press release, Lattice Engines adds a “best-in-class CDP to the depth and breadth of global commercial data in the Dun & Bradstreet Data Cloud and growing portfolio of complementary sales and marketing solutions.”  The combined capabilities join Dun & Bradstreet’s data capabilities with Lattice Engines AI and analytics.  The merged platform creates “an invaluable single source of sales and marketing truth” which helps companies “simplify their data, operate more productively and activate audiences through personalized, omnichannel campaigns that drive results.”

Dun & Bradstreet content has been a cornerstone of Lattice Engines for the past several years.  Already having standardized on a core set of data should expedite the acquisition.  When Dun & Bradstreet acquired Avention two years ago, the WorldBase and global contact datasets needed to be swapped into the Avention platform.  This time, a data swap will not be required (though some additional Dun & Bradstreet datasets will be included).

“This acquisition supports the strategy we announced when Dun & Bradstreet became a privately held company – to bring new technologies and innovation to our existing solutions, creating deeper customer value. With our investment in Lattice Engines, we will become a leading provider in the fast-growing B2B marketing analytics space, helping our clients accelerate revenue, grow their businesses and become more competitive.”

Dun & Bradstreet CEO Anthony Jabbour

Future content includes Dun & Bradstreet financial scores, sales trigger insights, and digital data (e.g. Audience Solutions IP and digital device identifiers).  Lattice Engines will also benefit from Dun & Bradstreet’s identity resolution capabilities.  These upgrades “will further enhance Lattice Engines’ best-in-class analytics models, improve personalization, and drive better results for our clients,” said EVP of Sales and Marketing Solutions, Michael Bird.