Episode 137 / Aimee Irwin / Experian Marketing Services, North America / VP Strategy & Partnerships
Podcast: Why Brands Need To Embrace Digital Identity Solutions
As the VP for Strategy and Partnerships at Experian Marketing Services North America, Aimee Irwin helps brands leverage technology to better enable their marketing efforts. Her background in strategy consulting combined with her interest in advertising and the impact technology can have on it to lead to her current role. Her Shiny New Object is the future state of identity in the marketing landscape, looking at how customers’ various identities and digital footprints can be harnessed by brands to offer them the best advertising and consumer experience.
Aimee’s best investment in her career has been building a strong network, over time and across the various places she has worked. In the end, she believes that, if you build connections with other people, it’s much easier to get things done at all stages of your career. This is what is helping her create valuable partnerships at Experian and what she advises newcomers into marketing to work to achieve.
Meeting people and learning from them as you progress through a marketing career is one of Aimee’s top tips to students. She also suggests that, if you’re considering a career in advertising, you need to be comfortable with change. This is a very dynamic industry and you need to constantly adapt to that.
Aimee’s Shiny New Object is intrinsically linked with the data services that Experian currently offer for marketing strategy: the future state of identity in the marketing landscape. As consumers engage in ever more digital transactions, identity becomes all the more important. One consumer can have multiple identities, on several devices within their household. Moreover, a household can be grouped into cohorts with identities at group level, then at individual level. All the data, as the Internet is moving towards more privacy and more consumer focus, will become extremely important to marketers to establish the identities and the preferences those consumers have.
In an era where consumers will have to opt in to leave their email address when interacting with a brand, Aimee thinks that marketeers will need to start constructing a 360-degree view of the customer, start applying frequency caps on the advertising they target them with, and strive to offer a personalised, unique end-to-end experience.
To find out more about Aimee’s advice on overcoming challenges to marketing in the world of online identities, her top marketing tip and her views on balancing creativity with harnessing data, listen to the podcast here.
Transcript
The following gives you a good idea of what was said, but it’s not 100% accurate.
Tom Ollerton 0:00
Hi, because you're listening to this podcast, you know exactly how powerful a good podcast really is, and how important the right guests are, and that guest could be you. The show today is sponsored by speak on podcasts.com, the world's leading podcast booking agency for b2b and tech brands, and they get people like you on podcasts like this, find out exactly how good they are by going to speak on podcasts.com forward slash leader, fill in the form and they'll send you three podcasts that you should be on. Fuel your brand on podcasts, speak on podcasts.com forward slash leader.
Hello, and welcome to the shiny new object podcast. My name is Tom Ollerton. I'm the founder of automated creative. And this is a podcast about the future of marketing. Every week or so I have the pleasure and the privilege of interviewing one of our industry's leaders. And this week is no different. I'm on a call with Aimee Irwin, who is VP of strategy and partnerships at Experian. Aimee, for those of the people listening to this podcast, you don't know who you are and what you do. Could we get a bit of an overview?
Aimee Irwin 1:22
Sure, absolutely. As you mentioned, I'm Aimee Irwin, I lead strategy and partnerships for Experian Marketing Services Division. Prior to Experian, I spent time in similar roles at Nielsen, AOL and several startups in the advertising technology space focusing on everything from digital video to mobile marketing. I started my career in strategy consulting, and that's where I became interested in technology and how technology can better enable marketing.
Now Experian, while Experian is known for our credit bureau and in related businesses, and I'm sure you've seen some of the advertisements for some of our consumer products. At our core, we're really a data and technology company, and at Experian marketing services, we help brands leverage the power of data and technology to make the right marketing decisions, better understand and connect with consumers. We offer marketers products around data identity and activation. And our consumer view data is based in offline PII and contains demographic interest, transaction data and other attributes on about 300 million people in the US. We've also always been known for our safe haven, or privacy friendly matching that supports the ability for marketers to connect their first party data to Experian and other third party data, activate that data across channels. And we're enabling data driven television for many years, largely based on our strong offline PII. And we recently acquired Tap Ad, a leader in digital identity resolution to enhance our digital identity capabilities.
Tom Ollerton 3:04
So curious to know which are the startups that you worked for?
Aimee Irwin 3:07
I worked for Verve Mobile, which is a mobile location company, which was sold I think about a year ago. Prior to that I worked for a company called Lightningcast, which we were actually the first company to insert advertisements into digital video. And that company was acquired by AOL.
Tom Ollerton 3:26
So that's a real mix of background. So I'm curious to know, working for startups or working for huge companies like AOL, and Nielsen, so on, what has been the best investment of your time, energy or money in this career so far?
Aimee Irwin 3:42
Yes? Well, I would say building a strong network is probably the best investment I've made. And that's happened over a long period of time as it takes time to really develop a network in an industry. But that network is really, it's invaluable as you progress in your career. It's so important to develop and maintain those relationships with people that you've, you've worked with, in a number of different capacities. And as you pointed out, I've been fortunate enough to work for both startups and large public companies. And that's really given me exposure to so many talented people that I do stay in touch with, and I am able to reach out to those people for expertise, or advice for introductions. And a lot of times, you know, in my current role, and focus on partnerships, it's really critical to have have those industry contacts at different companies that Experian may want to partner with.
Tom Ollerton 4:39
So I'm curious about building a network because to some people, it's quite easy. Some people like myself, it's really fun. I genuinely think that's one of my favorite parts of the job. But what would your advice be to people who hate networking and hate building contacts and just want to sit in a room and get the laptop open and get their work done?
Aimee Irwin 4:59
Yeah, I think, I think it's about getting to know people, I think. And I think what you will find is that if you do get to know people, it's much easier to get things done. So So while it's great to, you know, be focused and get your work done, if you don't have that human connection with the people that you work with, you know, progressing in your career and getting really accomplishing things is much harder.
Tom Ollerton 5:25
So, outside of building your network, and making those connections, what advice would you give to a student who was just about to enter the industry and wanted to follow in your footsteps?
Aimee Irwin 5:36
You know, there's a lot of great information out out there on our industry, a lot of different industry publications, trade groups, etc. And I would say, you know, reading all that really preparing, and then and then trying to meet with people in the industry, you know, which should be much easier now that the COVID restrictions are lifting. I imagine that was a challenge for a while. But when I've been exploring new opportunities, and just trying to learn, I've spent a lot of time meeting people for coffee, picking their brains, and what they see as interesting opportunities. And just learning in general, I would say people are, are often very willing to help, particularly if you come prepared, you demonstrate that you've spent the time to read up on the industry to read up on them and to read up on their company.
Tom Ollerton 6:21
And so how would you advise a student to validate whether this industry was right for them in the first place? Because there's a lot of sexy, shiny, exciting advertising out there. But the reality of advertising isn't, it isn't always that and quite rarely that how would you advise a student to really make sure that this was the industry for them?
Aimee Irwin 6:44
Sure. Well, you know, part of that is that research, and then research into the different careers within a particular industry and understanding the different paths. And that is talking to people that is talking to people and understanding, you know, what do you do every day? And what makes you successful? And what, you know, what, what are the underlying skills that really drive that, and in our industry is very dynamic. And I would say, every time I interview somebody, you know, I have to have to understand, are you? Are you the type of person that wants to do the exact same thing every day? And do it really well? Or are you very comfortable with change? Are you comfortable adjusting priorities? Are you just change excite you? Or does it really scare you? Because our industry is dynamic? And that's something that I think, as a you know, as a young student, trying to understand which which industry or which type of role they want to go into, that's really important.
Tom Ollerton 7:50
So I'm curious to know, in your career, Have you picked up any killer marketing tips, something that someone told you when you just started out, or someone just told you last week, what is the kind of killer one line bit of advice that you find yourself sharing most often?
Aimee Irwin 8:07
I would say that it's to keep consumers at the heart of your marketing strategy. And that means, you know, test test and test again. So we're fortunate that with digital marketing, it's much easier to test creative to test messaging, to test audience targeting, is much more difficult to do that with obviously a television ad that you'd have to spend a lot of money to just create. But But I've spent a lot of time over my career in focus groups where you're really listening to what consumers want, what they respond to, and maybe more importantly, what they don't respond to, and what turns them off. And that's really critical.
Because understanding consumers understanding who you know, you are marketing to and how they, what they want is, is critical.
Tom Ollerton 8:58
And so interesting, interesting to hear you reference, focus groups, when coming from as you described yourself at the start as being a sort of data and tech company. How do you feel about balancing the sort of claimed behavior in a focus group versus some of the unconscious, actual behavioral data that consumers kind of hand over to businesses knowingly or not, in terms of clicks or views?
Aimee Irwin 9:27
Yeah, it's a mix, right, because there's, there's, there's really important data and we know we support we support marketers as they measure their campaigns and in digital, it's, it's, it's pretty, it's much easier to understand what what messaging consumers are responding to. So I think you're in digital, you're able to do that with data, which is exciting, right? You're able to say, Okay, I put this message out there. I see that you know, people or consumers are responding more to say this message than that message right and optimize over time and make those real time optimizations. And that's what's exciting about why frankly, being able to leverage technology.
Tom Ollerton 10:20
This episode of the shiny new object podcast is brought to you in partnership with MAD//Fest. Whether it's live in London or streamed online to the global marketing community, you can always expect the distinctive and daring blend of fast paced content, startup innovation pitches, and unconventional entertainment from Mad fest events, you'll find me causing trouble on stage recording live versions of this podcast and sharing a beer with the nicest and most influential people in marketing. Check it out at www dot madfest london.com.
So we are roughly at the halfway stage now. So what I'm going to do is move across onto your shiny new object, which I am very interested in. So your shiny new object is the future state of identity in the marketing landscape. So that makes sense to me, I think. But can you help the listeners understand exactly what you mean by that?
Aimee Irwin 11:21
Sure. Identity is becoming increasingly important, with the shift of consumers relying more heavily on digital and media consumption that's become much more fragmented. So the rapid acceleration of digital transactions places a high priority on data driven digital identity solutions. So as you can imagine, during COVID, consumers, there was already a shift to digital, but we're now consuming media in so many different ways across so many different devices. And consumers can be represented by dozens of identities from different devices and locations, it's vital for marketers to be able to connect those data points so they can get that 360 view of the consumer. This allows them to deliver compelling channel into the into frequency cap advertisements as well, which contributes to the best experience for the consumer. As you can imagine, if you get the same ad, even if it's across multiple devices too many times in a particular period, that's not good. That's all I've got experience for the consumer.
Marketers must be able to link their first party data with third party data to better define customer segments and drive insights and strategies. experience helps clients do that in a privacy friendly way. And then they can also leverage our audience management platform to distribute these audiences across online and offline marketing channels. There are many use cases that identity supports for marketers, we've seen that marketers really recognize that customer experience is a really high priority. And they understand that today, managing that customer experience is much more complex. So they are starting to align various teams from e commerce from marketing to sales, to adjust our first party data and conduct that data to better understand our customers. So can imagine consumer can interact with a brand through a website and mobile app in store visits, both TV ads store, etc. The brand needs to use needs to use all those touch points often collected by different parts of the organization to better understand who their customers are. And now we're seeing this as a top priority for you know, chief marketing officers and sales leaders. In terms of their specific use cases. There's, you know, there's relevant advertising and reaching the right consumer, but there's also measurement. So when you see an ad, on mobile, and then you buy it on a desktop website, or you see an ad through direct mail, and then buy it online, marketers want to understand what's working and what's not. And then finally, there's personalization and customer experience.
So enabling seamless customer support and communication so that when you call, you know, a company, they can have all the information at their fingertips to give you the best personal customer experience.
Tom Ollerton 14:22
So what are the challenges here? So that everything you say makes sense? Yep, cool. 360 view, frequency capping, consumer centric experience across all devices. So why isn't this happening all the time everywhere for everyone?
Aimee Irwin 14:38
Well, right now, the industry is focused on Google's deprecation of the third party cookie in Chrome, which is expected next year and Apple's new requirement for users to opt in to be tracked across apps, which recently went into effect. The industry is grappling with the sort of changes that will impact the ability for marketers to stitch together all of that information about consumers to better understand who their consumers are and and create a better customer experience. So one important distinction with the third party cookies is that first party cookies will still be enabled, which means that publishers can set that cookie on their own domain. But they just won't be able to track at a cost site. So what we're seeing in response to these these changes, is that there are a lot of companies trying to develop solutions to replace the third party cookie. And essentially, most of those solutions involve publishers collecting email addresses from their users. And and then connecting those hashed emails across multiple sites, these all these alternative solutions coming to market is a good thing. I think we are planning to enable these solutions. And ultimately help build an advertising ecosystem that promotes the interoperability of multiple, multiple solutions, while enabling and fostering new innovations in a privacy forward. Right.
Tom Ollerton 16:19
So if we just jump back one second, so can you help us simplify the hashed email solution that you outlined there? I get it, mostly I think, but can you just help someone who doesn't have the same technical knowledge as you understand how that solution works? And what consumers and brands might expect from that?
Aimee Irwin 16:37
Sure what consumers will be asked to supply an email address, if they don't, then that's fine. They don't have to, but if they do, then that will be encrypted. And the ability for a publisher may be able to then in an encrypted form, as long as the consumer opts in, be able to connect that to other data through that encrypted email address.
Tom Ollerton 17:03
And what does that mean, for the consumer? What's their experience of this?
Aimee Irwin 17:06
Um, you know, if you go to a website today, and you have all of your cookies turned off, and you you know, save, put something in your cart, and then you come back, it may, it may not be in your cart, so so the consumer there are, there's value in cookies for the consumer. And, and the consumer, there's value for the consumer in, in receiving relevant offers and relevant messaging. And I think, as you think about as we think about being a, you know, a data and technology company and supporting marketing use cases, we think that there has to be that appropriate value exchange of consumers, you know, it's a privilege to have any data on a consumer, and we need to ensure that we're using it to, to better their user experience. And, and I think there is, there is important things that can be done with that data, as long as you know, as long as you're doing it in a very privacy friendly way.
Tom Ollerton 18:11
And so, with the internet moving into internet that seems to be seems to be more focused on the consumer, as opposed to focused on the advertiser. What do you think will be worse? What will be worse?
Aimee Irwin 18:26
Well, you know, there's undoubtedly been an increased focus on consumer privacy, which which we support control and transparency are critical and building trust with the consumer. And, and I think, you know, our research shows that consumers are comfortable sharing data that creates more personalized experiences, and that consumers have really come to expect relevant content and advertising. So when you say, what will be worse, I suppose, you know, consumers, if there is, if there are a lot of consumers that are that are opting out, I think they will have a have a a worse user experience. Will that will then consumers then understand the trade off potentially, potentially, but but but they should have the transparency and control and that's where the industry is actually moving.
Tom Ollerton 19:17
So what do you see as the new exciting innovations in the future state of identity, which are the companies or which are the ideas that you've seen that are going to be shaping identity online in the next couple of years?
Aimee Irwin 19:33
As we think about the future, we have always been focused on privacy and Experian has a lot of experience operating regulated data businesses, we have a global footprint, we have businesses that have much stricter privacy regulations than we do in the US to learn from or seeing a world where there are a lot of different identity solutions. And we need to allow our data to be leveraged across all meaningful solutions, which is not Unlike what we do today, so we recently acquired Tap Ad.
And they also have the same view with respect to identifiers. and Tap Ad, actually just launched a product called switchboard. So switchboards a module that exists within the tap out identity graph, and uses machine learning to find connections between these newer IDs. And the more traditional digital identifiers, such as first party cookies, mobile device IDs, connected TV IDs, which connected TV is obviously a very large and growing market. And we're seeing positive response to to this offering that really is, is designed to connect sort of these this disparate data in the new identity world. So help us understand a bit more about tap out, it's not a technology that I'm familiar with, how we understand what that product does, and why that was an exciting acquisition. Sure, Tap Ad is, is an identity graph that focuses on digital devices. So the ability to
Tom Ollerton 21:02
So what's an identity graph? Exactly.
Aimee Irwin 21:06
So an identity graph, will will have a concept not not, not personally, for tap, I had no personally identifiable information, but but an ident, anonymous identifier at a household level, and then other anonymous identifiers that are there that represent the individuals in those households and the devices that, that that are believed to be connected to that individual in that household. So you can see a use, there's two use cases that come to mind immediately. One is, you're an advertiser, and you're targeting an audience. And you want to extend that audience to all household, everybody in the household, not just one particular user, right, and all the devices, and then you're an advertiser, and you want to make sure that you're able to frequency cap your ads, so that, you know, so that me who I have a a desktop computer, an iPad, as well as an iPhone, and they want to make sure and, you know, connected TV, that I'm not seeing the same ad across all those devices more than a certain number of times in a particular 24 hour period. So so there's and in a measurement, right, so I use the example of I was, I see an ad on my mobile phone, but then I buy on my desktop, and they want to understand that, that that ad on a mobile phone was actually effective, because the sale on the on the desktop computer was linked to that.
Tom Ollerton 22:45
So what do you think will be the impact of these kind of technologies on creativity? Because we talked in very much immediate terms, like serving an ad on a desktop versus a, an iPad, or mobile or so on or TV? But are there gonna be new creative opportunities here? Or are we gonna have to go back to a more old school way of thinking creatively, because you won't be able to retarget in the same way? So are we gonna have to just think in a much more TV traditional sense, where an impression review is as much we're gonna have to work on, I think you're gonna see a little bit of everything, and the industry still figuring things out?
Aimee Irwin 23:24
So I think, you know, one study suggested that, that advertiser using up to, you know, four or five different identity solutions today, I think you're going to see the same thing with respect to attempts to understand impressions and understand the users behind those impressions, right. So in some sense, you may end up with something that's more cohort based, geo based, which might seem like going backwards, because it's not as one to one. But it does provide it does provide underlying data, it does provide some signal as to what a particular group may or may not want to see from a messaging perspective, or may or may not respond to, I do think there's going to be a learning process, and that there's going to be a lot of testing of different solutions. And and the industry has been through change before and has weathered it well. So. So, I am optimistic that that, that the future will ultimately be able to provide a very good balance between offering you know, the privacy and transparency and control to the to the consumer, but also offering the consumer the the relevant experiences that the consumer is used to.
Tom Ollerton 24:52
So I'm interested in knowing more about your views about gaining data around a cohort as you mentioned it or or a gap. I'm still not sure what the difference between a cohort and an audience. But maybe you could clear that up for me. But what kind of date? Are you thinking that brands are going to be able to collect on a cohort?
Aimee Irwin 25:10
Well, so I go back to we have, we have a segmentation data called mosaic. So and mosaic has a, you know, hundreds of segments, it's largely geo based, it's largely based on sort of zip code bubble data. And, and so you could think of that as a cohort, right? We sort of assume that in a particular geographic, zip code that a lot of the households and and individuals pay behave similarly. Right, not exactly the same, but similar. Like so. So that's an example of how you would use more I would call cohort based or groups of individuals or households, as opposed to what was thought of as the holy grail of advertising, which was one to one, deliver the, you know, deliver the right message to the right person at the right time, it's going to be more a little bit more aggregated, if you will. And that's been true in a lot of forms of advertising for a long time. And advertisers have made that work quite well.
Tom Ollerton 26:19
But what sort of data do you think is going to be available? So say, we choose a postcode or zip code, what we're going to sort of say, look, there's a million people in this zip code or the 1000s. And we're going to give them data back on, like they like this ad versus that ad, or is it helped me understand what kind of things a marketer should be expecting?
Aimee Irwin 26:40
Sure, one, one example. And it's a good example for experience is auto data, these this, you know, the people in sort of this zip code, or this zip plus whatever could be, could be more granular, geographically, right? Or have a high high propensity to buy SUVs. And they also tend to dine at, you know, these types of fast food restaurants, there's, you know, so there's, it's a lot of it is sort of behavioral and purchase, there's certainly some income and education and, you know, presence of children's age of them life, those types of things that help marketers, but there's also propensity to buy propensity to be interested in certain products. And I think that's where that's where you get the, that's what's really valuable, because there are people that there are a lot of products out there that quite frankly, like, you know, are only interesting to certain audiences and marketing to everybody is extremely wasteful. So not relevant to most of the consumers. So, you know, it's bad for the marketer and bad for the consumer.
Tom Ollerton 27:55
So I'm curious to know, what do you think about the services that I see pop up from time to time, which give consumers the opportunity to sell their data to brands, whether that's if they link up their bank account, or their social profiles, or their geo, or whatever it is, and I've seen a few try and a couple of fail, where they've actually tried to get consumers to sell their data to brands for a small amount of money? Have you seen that work? Is that gonna work? Or is this just something that people are gonna keep on trying until eventually, someone might get it right, reminds me of I have seen that recently pop up.
Aimee Irwin 28:37
It seems to be hard to get the scale. But we know it's possible. It could work.
It reminds me a little bit of the, you know, the early days of the internet, when people were paid to, you know, see ads and browse. And, you know, and I don't know, most of the all those companies failed. So to your point. And so I think it remains to be seen, I think this is a period of a lot of testing and a lot of, you know, exploration of new new ways to gather data. And, you know, we generally support that as long as it's a, you know, privacy friendly, you know, way of doing that which which, you know, this is fully opt in, in in the companies that you're mentioning. So I do think you're It remains to be seen whether they'll be successful, but but but it does make sense why those companies are starting to, to pop up now and, and we'll see what the consumer responses to them.
Tom Ollerton 29:46
Well, Aimee, unfortunately, we're gonna have to leave it there because we've run out of time. If someone wanted to get in touch with you, how would you like to do that?
Aimee Irwin 29:54
audiences at Experian dot com.
Tom Ollerton 29:56
Fantastic. So thanks so much for joining the Call today and anyone, listen to this, please drop the guy's experience online. And thank you it was really interesting. And we've learnt some new things.
Aimee Irwin 30:10
Thank you. I enjoyed it.
Tom Ollerton 30:17
Hi, just before you go, I'd really appreciate it. If you could take the time to write a review of the shiny new object podcast on Apple podcasts or iTunes, whatever it's called these days, or whichever podcast provider you use, wherever any podcasts. So it would go a long way for us if you could just share the Word and give us a bit of support on those channels such as be fantastic. If you haven't got time, that's also cool. And yeah, if you could tell your colleagues about the podcast and also, if possible, don't forget to subscribe. And I'd love to hear your feedback. If you'd like to speak on the podcast, I'll be a guest or you think I'm asking the wrong questions. Anything I'd be super interested to hear what you think so please email me at Tom at automated creative dotnet that's to art. I'm not gonna bother spelling it. Anyway. You'll work it out. Thanks so much.
Subscribe to the ‘Shiny New Object’ Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube and Soundcloud.