We help organisations to communicate with you consistently across your preferred channels, providing you with a better experience.
We help our clients to communicate with you consistently across your preferred channels, providing you with a better experience. We do this through two services – data linkage and identity resolution.
Our linkage database is simply a look up of various ways of identifying an individual, the household or area in which they live, such as name, postal address, email address, mobile telephone number or town. We obtain this personal data from our third party partners (see the section on Where do we obtain personal data from? for more information)
Our marketing services help organisations communicate to you in an offline context, for example through postal marketing. Increasingly, however, organisations also want to talk to you across digital channels such as by email, online advertising, social media or even addressable TV.
We use this linkage database to enable clients to connect data from these different sources to build up a better picture of an individual or household across all their preferred marketing channels. It enables us to apply the insight from our models and segments held on our name and address marketing database to these other identifiers, such as connecting an email address with a postal address
Linkage enables our clients – brands, digital publishers and advertisers, and public service organisations - to improve the relevancy of the marketing served to you, across a range of offline and online channels. Organisations are then able to deliver more joined up and consistent messaging however you engage with them (for example by email, through a website, or by post), providing you with a better overall experience.
There are several specific linkage services we offer to our clients:
This is where we help organisations advertise to an audience or learn more about an audience by connecting it to that of another party. For example so that an advertiser can show ads to its customers on the pages of a publisher website.
By linking the first party IDs of the different parties we provide a way for them to share data without them needing to move or disclose data to each other. This enables them to help make the ads shown more relevant, or provide a better understanding of an audience, without being exposed to data that does not originate from their own website and that they gained your consent to receive. (See the section on "Sharing insights across groups" for more information).
This is where we help our clients to identify people that may be interested in their products and services, so they can serve relevant adverts across digital channels.
Here, we create audiences (groups of individuals) by applying our models and segments to our marketing database and linking these securely using an encrypted email address or mobile telephone number to the online publisher's own subscriber records. This allows, for example, a brand to identify subscribers to a website or social media app who might be interested in the particular product or service they are offering and serve an ad to these groups of subscribers.
We don't serve any ads to you ourselves – the publisher, for example a website or social media app, will do this based on the consent choices you have given to them directly. Our role is not to create more advertising as you will see an advert in that place on the screen regardless. Rather we help to create more relevant advertising for you by helping our clients to identify consumers online and by creating groups who are likely to be interested in the product or service offered through the digital advertising.
This is where we help organisations advertise to an audience or learn more about an audience by connecting it to that of another party. For example, we help advertisers and publishers to identify where they have users or consumers in common, so that the advertiser can show ads to its customers on the pages of the publisher’s website.
By linking the first party IDs of the different parties, we provide a way for them to identify these matches without them needing to move or disclose personal data about website or app users to each other. This gives advertisers a better understanding of the audience they’re looking for target and helps make ads shown on publisher websites more relevant, without being exposed to data that does not originate from their own website and that they have permission to receive. (See the section on "Sharing insights across groups" for more information).
This is when we uniquely identify an individual, allowing organisations to create a single view of their customers so they can communicate with you more effectively, reduce multiple communications being made in error to the same individual, and deliver services to you efficiently and appropriately in a joined-up way.
Our identity resolution service helps our clients to review their own customer records across multiple formats or databases to ensure that the personal data they hold about you is accurate.
To do this, when we see names and addresses from 3rd party contributors to our marketing database, from the Edited Electoral Roll, from 3rd party suppression files, or from our own marketing suppression files we identify unique individuals in unique households, giving each a series of unique identifiers. These records are added to our reference database of names and addresses along with the unique keys associated to them.
When we are asked by our clients to review their customer records, which might come from several different databases, our identity resolution services consider all the different presentations of an individual's name (e.g. Mr Jon Smith, Mr J Smith and Mr Jonathan Smith) and any change of address. Using the knowledge in our name and address reference database, we add a unique identifier to these individuals so that records for the same individual can be processed in a consistent way.
This helps our clients to make sure that they…
This all helps to reduce multiple communications being made in error to the same customer, and helps our clients use their resources most effectively. It allows public sector organisations to deliver their services efficiently and appropriately in a joined-up way.
By including your name and address in our reference database, it also enables us to ensure that if you are present on our opt out file or on 3rd party marketing suppression files, that these preferences are respected when we see your contact details from another source - even if your name and address is presented slightly differently from the format we hold on our reference file.
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