• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, September 24, 2014

Disparate enterprise systems and media channels that keep data in silos could further complicate attribution for brands and retailers, but one company Wednesday launched a strategy to support companies in the digital advertising industry looking to link customer data across platforms.

As part of the Experian Marketing Suite, Experian Marketing Services unveiled OmniView to connect disparate systems and give companies one view of customer data and marketing campaigns across channels and devices. The new platform, built to process mounds of data, comes from an established strategy supporting Experian Marketing Services' clients in one capacity or another for more than 20 years, per Rick Erwin, president, consumer insights and targeting at Experian Marketing Services.

Experian offers a variety of linking platforms. The technologies currently process 3.5 billion records monthly in North America alone. OmniView aims to solve issues around customer data quality, accuracy, and authenticity. It connects CRM, point of sale, purchasing, enterprise, email, search, social, mobile cookies, and even set-top-box data. The system also appends Experian dataset onto profiles and is not limited to channel or device.

Experian research reveals that nearly all company executives believe achieving one view of customer data will remain crucial to businesses, although only 24% admit to having that view today. 

While connecting disparate systems will help give marketers one view of customer data, a gap will likely remain for years to come, because brands will likely never share competitive purchase data with retailers.

Although the integration of offline retail data into online systems to see one view of customer purchases would solve the problem of waste caused by retargeting an ad to someone who showed interested in a product online and made the purchase in a physical store, it is easier than trying to get the brand to share sales data with retailers, admits Matt Ackley, Marin Software CMO, in an earlier interview about attribution. "Providing other signals can help advertisers understand how long they may want to retarget the consumer," he said. "There are other ways to set retargeting attributes across channels."