Nielsen's eXelate Pushes Into Mobile, Springs Into Billions Of User Identities
- by Joe Mandese @mp_joemandese, November 3, 2015
In a deal being announced today with one of
the world’s largest aggregators of mobile user identities and behaviors, Nielsen’s eXelate unit will dramatically expand its footprint of data identifying mobile users.
The deal is significant because eXelate is already one of the dominant data management platforms (DMP) and exchanges enabling brands and publishers to identify and target consumers with digital ads online -- and increasingly in mobile.
It is also significant because it enables Nielsen’s eXelate to dramatically increase its coverage of the mobile user universe at a time when the power of identifying and targeting mobile users appears to be shifting to so-called “walled gardens” -- especially Google and Facebook -- that are able to leverage their user log-ins and extend their reach to the universe of mobile apps and users that integrate with it.
The agreement with Seattle-based PushSpring will enable both companies to make more of a market out of PushSpring’s data, which processes “billions of monthly mobile app and device-level signals.”
Company executives said they didn’t know exactly how much the deal would boost eXelate’s coverage of the mobile user universe, or even how big the universe actually is -- after factoring for the complex nature of cookie and device inflation, redundancy and deflation factors. But they offered to come up with an estimate and provide it to MediaPost in the near future.
The deal gives 2-year-old venture-funded startup PushSpring a new platform for marketing its data directly and indirectly to the major national advertisers and blue chip publishers that are the core of Nielsen’s and eXelate’s customer base.
“PushSpring is one of the first companies to offer independent deterministic mobile device-level data at scale,” said Karl Stillner, CEO and Co-Founder of PushSpring.
“Working with eXelate, we are bringing the power of our mobile app and device data to the programmatic ecosystem in a big way,” Stillner said in a statement, emphasizing the company’s independent position in the marketplace and the “deterministic” value of its data.“eXelate’s mobile audience data distribution capabilities across every major ad server, DSP, and agency trading desk are well known, and this relationship is one we think will have lasting benefits for all involved, especially the advertisers using this audience data to find high-intent mobile customers.”
As the audience segmentation and identification business matures, will identity duplication matter so much? Marketers may have to reach target audiences through multiple channels, including the walled gardens, in various combinations. But they will be reaching the same, presumably interested individuals numerous times over the course of campaigns. If I am on my phone or tablet, and have also been identified on my pc, it only matters if the identifying agents - Google, Facebook, publishers I visit, Verizon (my mobile carrier), etc. have categorized my interests with reasonable accuracy. I likely won't even notice that a message is being paased to me via the different channels, or be bothered; it depends on the relevance and quality of the message.