By Phil Parrish on February 12th, 2019
PrograMetrix Ad Tech Review: LiveRamp
Industry Leader in CRM Targeting & Data Onboarding
February is here, and during this time of year, our team eagerly anticipates attending the LiveRamp "RampUp" conference at the historic Fairmont Hotel atop Nob Hill in beautiful San Francisco.
With over 2,500 attendees (500 of which are VP level+) and an audience that consists of prominent brands, ad agencies, data providers, and ad tech platforms, LiveRamp’s RampUp conference is considered the premier conference for marketing executives in the “martech” industry.
With two full days of content covering key topics like data and privacy ethics, data onboarding, custom audience segmentation, and B2B targeting, RampUp offers a great environment to enhance your professional skills while networking with powerhouse executives in the martech industry. But here is the icing on the cake – this year’s closing keynote speaker is the GM of the Oakland Athletics baseball club and “Moneyball” man Billy Beane. For all the analytics and baseball nerds out there like us, this is a can’t miss!
A technology company managing an event at this scale that brings together some of the best marketers in the world is obviously doing something right. But let’s put the sizzle of the annual RampUp conference aside for a few moments. LiveRamp’s technology solutions and talented team of people are second to none, and the company has made some strategic moves over the last year to better position themselves in the marketplace in an effort to fuel further growth.
Last February, LiveRamp acquired the Seattle based B2B data provider Pacific Data Partners (“PDP”) to enhance the B2B side of its business. At that time, PDP offered over 50 billion B2B records to its customers. You can think of these business records as digital business cards. Through the acquisition of PDP, LiveRamp now provides job title targeting, firmographic profiles about businesses, and technographic data about the technologies businesses use, for its customers. The specialized B2B data LiveRamp acquired now complements its B2C data which closes the loop on its IdentityLink product, which we will discuss later in this article.
The move that made the biggest impact on LiveRamp’s business involved its parent company – Acxiom – selling its Acxiom Marketing Solutions (AMS) business unit to Interpublic Group (IPG) in July of 2018. The Acxiom name and trademarks went to IPG in the deal. Acxiom then re-named its remaining business unit LiveRamp, which started trading under the ticker symbol “RAMP” on the NYSE on October 2nd, 2018.
See also: PrograMetrix Ad Tech Review: Factual
LiveRamp was Acxiom’s fastest growing business segment, but AMS drove over 75% of Acxiom’s revenue before the deal. LiveRamp is now positioning itself as a subscription-based “middleware technology” platform to strategically enter a larger marketplace than solely being defined as an ad tech platform.
This move helped LiveRamp trade at more than $3.5 billion by October of 2018 despite selling off 75%+ of its revenue while trading at $2.5 billion earlier in 2018. Think of that for a moment!
LiveRamp Product Features
LiveRamp’s core “IdentityLink” product enables brands to onboard offline and online customer data and distribute that data to one of over 500 media buying platforms in their “data store” marketplace.
With our help, brands are able to create custom first-party audience segments and make those segments available to DSP media buying platforms.
In addition to segmenting first-party audiences, IdentityLink helps brands and agencies access third-party data providers through a streamlined marketplace. Within one interface, we help our clients discover and activate third-party data from over 120 providers.
Custom segments can be created with third-party providers, and data can be shared with co-op partners to make second-party data available for audience targeting.
First-, second-, and third-party data segments can then be distributed for activation across multiple programmatic media channels and device types. From Connected TV to Digital Audio or Snap, you can reach the same audience with a personalized message and measure the impact.
LiveRamp Audience Segmentation & Targeting Examples
Once first-party offline or online data from a brand’s CRM system is onboarded securely (we’ll get to that in a moment), LiveRamp’s platform makes it easy to segment the data and apply and/or “Boolean logic” to customize the data for audience targeting.
To help you apply these concepts, we’ve showcased custom segments we have helped our clients develop below, using examples from a variety of industries:
Technology & B2B
- Onboarded CRM data for a software company in the cybersecurity industry
- Segmented data into audiences of high value customers, customers up for renewal, & active prospects to personalize messaging for ad targeting
- Used filters to change our ad message to update customers that their software package was up for renewal at the 90, 60, 30, & 10-day milestones
- Measured performance of company across programmatic display, mobile, video & native channels
Government & Politics
- Onboarded voter registration data for a Lt. Governor’s campaign in the Pacific Northwest
- Segmented data into custom first-party audiences by pairing registered party affiliation with likeliness to vote in specific voter registration zones
- Targeted custom segments in a true omnichannel setup across programmatic display, mobile, video, connected tv, digital audio, and native channels with reporting across each channel
College & Universities
- Onboarded CRM data for a top 25 MBA program on the west-coast for 5 MBA programs and several specialty Masters Programs
- Created custom audience segments for geographic regions and referring undergraduate business programs
- Supplemented first-party audience segments with third-party segments from the data store including age range, job title, and industry targeting
Programmatic Data Privacy
We use the LiveRamp platform to onboard our clients’ CRM data via a secure CSV, TSV, or TXT file. LiveRamp’s secure data transfer process encrypts data transfers via sftp, and its sftp server sits behind a firewall in a DMZ. By leveraging LiveRamp’s technology, we provide a safe, secure, and easy way to match our client’s confidential CRM data to online cookies and device IDs. Once the matching process is completed, audiences can be segmented, distributed to a media buying platform, and activated for targeting.
We provide full-service data onboarding, audience segmentation, and data management services for our clients, but we also train brands and agencies to become self-sufficient with LiveRamp’s technology. We have a simple process that makes the secure transfer of CRM data easy on our clients, and we provide data privacy guidelines to follow throughout the onboarding process.
Final Thoughts on LiveRamp
We hope to see some of you reading this article in San Francisco at the 2019 RampUp Event. For those who are not attending, or if you are reading this after February 2019, we highly recommend attending a future RampUp conference if you are in the martech industry and want to build better relationships with key stakeholders in the space.
LiveRamp bolstered its B2B account-based-marketing (ABM) capabilities by acquiring Pacific Data Partners in February of 2018 to complement its core IdentityLink B2C data marketplace. In early October of 2018, LiveRamp became a true stand-alone business from its previous parent Acxiom and started trading under the ticker symbol RAMP on the NYSE. These strategic moves should help the company sustain a 20%+ YOY growth rate over the next couple of years.
We walked you through the LiveRamp IdentityLink platform which provides an intuitive self-serve solution for onboarding and segmenting CRM data. We also discussed the LiveRamp data store marketplace, and showcased examples of how we have leverage LiveRamp’s technology to create custom audience segments, and how we activate those segments in an omnichannel strategy for our clients.
If you would like to learn more about LiveRamp’s technology or our audience segmentation and data management services, feel free to contact us or provide feedback on this article below.
