• by Tobi Elkin , Staff Writer @tobielkin, January 13, 2016

MediaMath on Wednesday announced the launch of a proprietary data service called Helix. The new service aims to package the large data sets that MediaMath’s partners and its clients provide, build predictive audiences and actionable insights and evolve the way in which programmatic buyers use data to drive performance.

Despite the plethora of data available to marketers, it remains challenging to make use of it and extrapolate meaningful insights, said Jacob Ross, president of Helix, in an email to Real-Time Daily. “Even after shifting significant budget, and making investments in and around programmatic strategies, advertisers still struggle with the limited scale of their own customer data and unreliability of third-party data. Helix is MediaMath’s answer to this problem: pooling high-quality data that truly helps drive business outcomes.”

Helix  will use predictive analytics and transactional signals to dig deeper, according to Ross. "What people buy is one of the strongest indications of what they might purchase in the future. Helix offers access to a large amount of this audience, and has enriched that with additional attributes that allow us to form a holistic, yet completely anonymous, picture of what a user has done. They then predict what customers will do next to maximize marketing effectiveness."

Previously, the only way the company's clients were able to use data products was through integrations MediaMath built with external data providers. Helix represents both a new in-house data capabiility, and a commitment to do more with data partners to offer a seamless way for advertisers to accelerate their programmatic capabilities.

Helix will start with real-time, transactional, anonymized data, from one-third of the top 100 largest retailers in the U.S. and hundreds of other member’s data, according to a release. Helix will be integrated with MediaMath’s buying platform, the TerminalOne OS, to make buying more seamless.

A handful of brands and agencies have been using Helix in beta for the last six months. “We have a lot of data about our own customers,” said Rachel Silva, AVP of marketing at Pep Boys, in a release, “but that data is limited in scale." Silva said that Helix is offering Pep Boys the ability to tap into a much wider pool of shoppers. "We have seen dramatic improvement in campaign performance since joining Helix, and it has become an integral part of our audience targeting strategy," Silva said.

The announcement follows on the heels of a deal in early December when MediaMath announced a partnership with SkimLinks to offer brands and agencies access to Audiences, a programmatic audience targeting service. That partnership enabled MediaMath to become the first demand-side platform to directly integrate with Skimlinks' content monetization platform for digital publishers.