As companies try to improve consumer messaging around online ad targeting in anticipation of new privacy regulation, technology platform company [x+1] this week released an application giving marketers and agencies the ability to integrate customer and third-party online and offline data to target ads.

The platform, Open Data Bridge, supports targeting data across multiple channels, such as display ad, Web site and email campaigns. The service, being offered as part of [x+1]'s trading desk platform, has been tapped by several undisclosed "large" clients.

The platform can integrate both offline and online data. Clients often will provide cookie pools or offline data that [x+1] can bring into the platform. Other data comes from third-party companies offering demographic stats, such as TargusInfo and eXelate.

Other types of data include in-market and lifestyle segmentation from BlueKai, social graphs from XGraph, and contextual from AdSafe Media, which analyzes all elements of page content, including text, images, events and domain information to rate the brand safety of a page.

Kenneth Rona, vice president of data strategy and analytics for [x+1], says the challenge to integrate data from third-party companies begins with different data formats, but doesn't end with incomplete database fields. Another challenge relates to integrating data across multiple campaigns.

"We have a business around display media and site optimization, so we can use the data across both channels, as clients demand it," Rona says. "We can fold in the data to the optimization engine, POE, and use data variables for campaigns to figure out which are predictive in a multivariate way."

Clients want an integrated view of channel performance, so they not only can see results from online campaigns, but offline, too. Advertisers that bill consumers who log on to a Web site that requires registration can pull in data they tie to a cookie and pass off the cookie ID with consumer information without personally identifiable information (PII), of course, he says.

Within the next 10 years, Rona says companies will have one view of offline and online customer data. That data will tie together information from IP addresses on set-top television boxes, mobile phone and PC Web browsers, email campaigns, and more.

Technology moves closer to reality, but challenges exist, he says. "You need to connect the link from the cookie on the set-top box IP address -- to the email, for example," he says. "We're not doing this."

Vendors that have access to multiple data channels will have the ability to do a nice job of cross-channel attribution, Rona says. These type of companies include AT&T and Verizon, because both have access to data coming from consumer homes via set-top boxes.

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