• by Laurie Sullivan , Yesterday

Experian and Verve Group on Tuesday announced their latest collaboration — bringing high-accuracy targeting to ID-less audiences.

The collaboration combines Verve’s on-device intelligence with Experian’s marketing data.

Executives at the companies told MediaPost the collaboration empowers marketers to reach their intended audiences even in environments where traditional identifiers are restricted or unavailable.

“When we do predictions on devices, Android and iOS, these signals are different from commodity-type signals,” says Prajwal Barthur, who is senior vice president of product for the Verve Group, and has had experience at Amazon and InMobi. “We use battery consumption of the device, display lightness and gestures, and we know what app they use at what times of the day, along with the amount of type spent. We also get device movement.”

Verve does not take the signals and send data to servers, but can identify on-device signals in a privacy-compliant way, Barthur said. When a gender prediction is done -- male vs. female or age group, for example -- identity is not involved.

These are device signals, not server-side signals, and this is where Experian comes in to verify them. 

Barthur said the question most asked by buyers is "how do I know the cohorts are accurate, and this is the problem we solve through Experian."

As the advertising-technology industry searches for scalable identity alternatives, Verve will use less conventional but increasingly viable approaches with on-device cohorts known as Anonymized Targeting on Mobile (ATOM).

Experian marketing data supports ID-based and ID-less methods. Verve complements this by applying its ID-less graph and on-device intelligence to expand audience reach in privacy-restricted environments.

This collaboration is intended to strengthen the integrity of the data to ensure marketers can connect with audiences, even as traditional identifiers become less available.

The models find the correlations between the user and behaviors, and then find the devices. It is all done on the devices.

“Device signals are much stronger,” he said.

Now available for Android, ATOM, Verve’s proprietary ID-less on-device contextual platform, expands options for ID-less targeting and monetization across more than 65,000 apps in Verve’s programmatic ecosystem. Already active on 30% of Verve’s iOS traffic, ATOM has generated more than 740 unique audience cohorts across behavioral, contextual, and demographic traits.

Experian will assess and benchmark the accuracy and relevance of ATOM-generated cohorts for Verve, including gesture-based demographic cohorts, to estimate user traits based on touch signals such as swipe velocity, screen pressure, and interaction patterns. 

To ensure transparency and reliability, ATOM cohorts will be validated against Experian’s comprehensive U.S. consumer database, which includes 300 million individuals and 126 million households.