• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, November 30, 2011

With Annalect, Omnicom Media Group is quietly rolling out a strategy identifying propensity and buying signals from non-digital channels combined with digital signals to create a more complete audience targeting ad profile.

The idea is to stuff years of aggregate media research, behavioral research, and attitudinal research analyzed by experts into digital data management platforms. It would add what Omnicom refers to as "synthetic" signals to audience segments and groups of cookies. 

Synthetic means having an audience segment built for an advertiser with consumers who might like fashion, technology, and specific brands. This audience segment lives in a certain geographic location and tends to have a higher propensity to drink PepsiMax than anything else. Annalect has determined a method to match that offline activity to a digital audience.

The strategy takes some match keys like age and geo and uses them to augment available digital data, not with a direct signal, but with a synthetic signal, which might assume the consumer will drink PepsiMax every day for an entire month. It's based on specific buying behavior.

While Omnicom will take the lead in designing the strategy and the processes, BlueKai will support the service through technology. "We're the plumbing and some of the data," Omar Tawakol, BlueKai CEO told MediaPost.

Tawakol said allowing companies to use offline data in their online ad targeting will give them a competitive edge. Several companies may compete for the same inventory on ad exchanges. The company with the knowledge to gain that data at a better price or willingness to pay more because it will produce higher results gets the advantage.  

When Tawakol sat down with Dean McRobie, CTO of Annalect, to find out what data platforms need to do to make this vision become a reality, he said demand side platform provides need to figure out how to overlay data that doesn't come into the system in pixel form. 

In fact, there are lots of challenges, such as being able to use the data in real time, and structuring it to join data segments, rather than map cookies.  It's a complicated subject, but companies will need to sort through the details of joining offline and online data before becoming truly successful.